js_of_ocaml VS ocaml-protoc

In reality, most folks that developed BuckleScript frontends with ReasonML switched to ReScript syntax and are happy with it. Some felt more friction because of their reliance on PPXes or FP-heavy libraries (like Relude) and those people tend to use the Melange fork of BuckleScript or they switched to js_of_ocaml.

TL;DR: Reason is, and always has been, independent of ReScript (formerly BuckleScript) and is still actively maintained. If you want to use Reason or OCaml to make native code you can. If you want to compile JS from OCaml or Reason you also still can, but you'll want to use either js_of_ocaml or a BuckleScript fork named Melange that was made in response to the BuckleScript/ReScript people's shenanigans. And if you only care about JS-like syntax and JS output, you can use ReScript.

Personally, I just use OCaml and compile to JavaScript with Js_of_ocaml. Js_of_ocaml has been stable and actively maintained for a decade, and I don't have to worry if some superficial syntactic change that affects nothing but ASCII art is going to break my code.

The compilation to JavaScript is the sweet section of this blog post since we are using OCaml (under the hood while writing Reason), and it allows us to compile directly to JavaScript using js_of_ocaml.

To start, we'll install the open source protobuf compiler, ocaml-protoc. We'll use this for the OCaml project, which is where we'll start. The project tree structure will look like this.