ionide-vscode-fsharp VS ocaml

Compare ionide-vscode-fsharp vs ocaml and see what are their differences.

ocaml

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries (by ocaml)
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ionide-vscode-fsharp ocaml
16 118
836 5,127
0.4% 2.0%
8.7 9.9
15 days ago 4 days ago
F# OCaml
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ionide-vscode-fsharp

Posts with mentions or reviews of ionide-vscode-fsharp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-17.
  • Is there a modern IDE with good support for OCaml?
    2 projects | /r/ocaml | 17 Oct 2022
    I'd love to see something similar to Microsoft's Ionide project or for JetBrains to invest in IDE support.
  • Why OCaml?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Sep 2022
    > Pretty good, https://ionide.io

    It pains me to admit it because I really like F# but, with due respect to the developers, Ionide and its related projects are the most unstable toolchain I've ever used.

    Spend half a day reloading the editor because the extension keeps hanging on non-trivial MSBuild only to discover that the formatter has truncated in half one of the files you worked on due to a soundness bug. (OCaml's editor support, in contrast, is quite stable.)

    Rider is the best editing experience I've had with F#, by far.

    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Sep 2022
    The DarkLang project was originally written in OCaml and was recently ported to F# (https://blog.darklang.com/new-backend-fsharp/)

    > How much work would it take in term of code rewriting?

    There are definitely code changes required, but I think those are quite manageable as concepts mostly map 1:1 from OCaml to F#.

    > can it compile to native code?

    Yup, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

    > how good is the language support experience in vscode?

    Pretty good, https://ionide.io

    (but I personally prefer JetBrains Rider)

    > any reason not to do it?

    Compilation speed, some OCaml language features?

  • How to get a non-broken F# development experience?
    4 projects | /r/fsharp | 5 Sep 2022
    I know it's a recurring topic but it's reaching a high level of pain *again* (see NET SDK 6.0.400 and 7.0.100 previews don't currently work with Ionide).
  • The Case for C# and .NET
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jul 2022
    I don't disagree but it owes a lot of that to OCaml. That said, since we're talking about C#, F# and VS Code I'm gonna talk about a pet peeve I have. If you open a C# project in VS Code when the "Ionide" (basically the F# plugin for Code) is installed then Ionide thinks it's a F# project and will open some F# stuff after a few seconds (or prompt you to setup some F# stuff in its gitignore). The root cause has been identified (plugin activates when it sees a ".sln" file), a PR have been opened and rejected with no mention as to why (https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp/pull/1401) and the developers behind it are frustratingly non-communicative about it, closing issues about it (https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp/issues/1701). Usual rules about OSS maintainers apply, they don't technically owe us users anything ... but man it feels like we're being trolled by now :D
  • Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jun 2022
    F# doesn't have a hard dependency on vscode. Resources from MS will obviously encourage using MS tooling, but ionide [1] is really good. The lsp+neovim workflow is not as good but getting better.

    [1] https://ionide.io/

  • Perf Avore: A Rule Based CrossPlatform Performance Based Monitoring and Analysis Tool
    5 projects | dev.to | 20 Dec 2021
    Perf Avore was developed on VSCode using the ionide plugin and dotnet cli.
  • A few newbie questions
    2 projects | /r/fsharp | 18 Nov 2021
    I was on .Net 5 but same issue on 6. I tried the fix here- setting FSharp.dotnetRoot explicitly in settings.json and so far it seems better.
  • Web Scrapping with F#
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Aug 2021
    Once we have our dependencies ready, we can start digging in with the code in VSCode using Ionide, Rider or Visual Studio.
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Aug 2021

ocaml

Posts with mentions or reviews of ocaml. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-17.
  • The Return of the Frame Pointers
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2024
    You probably already know, but with OCaml 5 the only way to get flamegraphs working is to either:

    * use framepointers [1]

    * use LBR (but LBR has a limited depth, and may not work on on all CPUs, I'm assuming due to bugs in perf)

    * implement some deep changes in how perf works to handle the 2 stacks in OCaml (I don't even know if this would be possible), or write/adapt some eBPF code to do it

    OCaml 5 has a separate stack for OCaml code and C code, and although GDB can link them based on DWARF info, perf DWARF call-graphs cannot (https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/12563#issuecomment-193...)

    If you need more evidence to keep it enabled in future releases, you can use OCaml 5 as an example (unfortunately there aren't many OCaml applications, so that may not carry too much weight on its own).

    [1]: I haven't actually realised that Fedora39 has already enabled FP by default, nice! (I still do most of my day-to-day profiling on an ~CentOS 7 system with 'perf --call-graph dwarf', I was aware that there was a discussion to enable FP by default, but haven't noticed it has actually been done already)

  • Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
    19 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    11. OCaml - $91,026
  • OCaml: a Rust developer's first impressions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    > But .mli files do not help with the "no types in the source code" problém

    It partially helps since it forces you to have types where they matters most: interfaces.

    > And I did not experience any advantage of separate signature files so far,

    100kLoc is already quite big! I'm starting to think I'm an outlier since a lot of people don't see the benefits :)

    For me, it helps because I really don't want to see the implementation when I use an API. If I need to look at the implementation, it means the interface isn't well specified. All I need should be in the interface: types, docs, (abstract) types. And no more.

    Typically, an .ml file will have more than what is exported, types won't be abstract but will have a concrete implementation, and type signatures may be missing. How would it feels like to use list if only https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.ml was available, instead of https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.mli?

    Haskell tells you what is exported from a module, but it only shows you the names. To see the signatures, you need to rely on generated doc.

    Arguably, since OCaml has includes, it suffers from the same problem, your ".mli" may have tons of include and it becomes harder to see what's exported without an external tool

    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    > It partially helps since it forces you to have types where they matters most: exported functions

    But the problém the OP has is not knowing the types when reading the source (in the .ml file).

    > How would it feels like to use list if only https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/stdlib/list.ml was available,

    If the signature where in the source file (which you can do in OCaml too), there would be no problem - which is what all the other (for some definition of "other") languages except C and C++ (even Fortran) do.

    No, really, I can't see a single advantage of separate .mli files at all. The real problém is that the documentation is often worse too, as the .mli is autogenerated and documented afterwards - and now changes made later in the sources need to be documented in the mli too, so anything that doesn't change the type often gets lost. The same happens in C and C++ with header files.

  • Bringing more sweetness to ruby with sorbet types 🍦
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Sep 2023
    If you have been in the Ruby community for the past couple of years, it's possible that you're not a super fan of types or that this concept never passed through your mind, and that's totally cool. I myself love the dynamic and meta-programming nature of Ruby, and honestly, by the time of this article's writing, we aren't on the level of OCaml for type checking and inference, but still, there are a couple of nice things that types with sorbet bring to the table:
  • What is gained and lost with 63-bit integers? (2014)
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    Looks like there have been proposals to eliminate use of 3 operand lea in OCaml code (not accepted sadly):

    https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/8531

  • What can Category Theory do?
    2 projects | /r/askmath | 22 Jun 2023
    Haskell and Agda are probably the most obvious examples. Ocaml too, but it is much older, so its type system is not as categorical. There is also Idris, which is not as well-known but is very cool.
  • Playing Atari Games in OCaml
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jun 2023
  • Bloat
    4 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 22 May 2023
    That does sound problematic, but without the code it is hard to tell what is the issue. Typically, compiling a 6kLoc file like https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/typing/typecore.ml takes 0.8 s on my machine.
    4 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 22 May 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ionide-vscode-fsharp and ocaml you can also consider the following projects:

Alpaca-API - The Alpaca API is a developer interface for trading operations and market data reception through the Alpaca platform.

VisualFSharp - The F# compiler, F# core library, F# language service, and F# tooling integration for Visual Studio

playwright-dotnet - .NET version of the Playwright testing and automation library.

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

TradeAlgo - Stock trading algorithm written in Python for TD Ameritrade.

melange - A mixture of tooling combined to produce JavaScript from OCaml & Reason

rust - Rust for the xtensa architecture. Built in targets for the ESP32 and ESP8266

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

koka - Koka language compiler and interpreter

rescript-compiler - The compiler for ReScript.

proposal-pipeline-operator - A proposal for adding a useful pipe operator to JavaScript.

Feliz - A fresh retake of the React API in Fable and a collection of high-quality components to build React applications in F#, optimized for happiness