koka VS ocaml

Compare koka vs ocaml and see what are their differences.

ocaml

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries (by ocaml)
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koka ocaml
31 119
3,036 5,150
1.4% 1.4%
9.8 9.9
3 days ago about 23 hours ago
Haskell OCaml
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later 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.

koka

Posts with mentions or reviews of koka. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-03.
  • What features would you want in a new programming language?
    5 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 3 Jan 2023
    It also offers a great Inversion of Control mechanism where everything is customisable, and, unlike Capability Objects, AESs also offer compatibility with type inference (you can pass functions doing IO to map, and it Just Works(TM)) and first-class control over stack frames (because really a continuation function is just some stack frames, which you can manually move to the heap if you want a closure; which means async is an effect!). It also is composable in ways Monads are not.
  • What are you doing about async programming models? Best? Worst? Strengths? Weaknesses?
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 7 Dec 2022
    Koka and other languages implementing Algebraic Effect Systems make everything a user-defined case of coroutines: async is just another effect/Monadic type. Zig does something similar by having first class stack frames, making all function calls possibly asynchronous.
  • Letlang, a programming language targetting Rust - Road to v0.1
    3 projects | /r/rust | 24 Nov 2022
    Super interesting, there is a proposal to add this to JavaScript and several languages that use this, unison, koka & eff. I had no idea this was even a thing!
  • Let's collect relatively new research programming languages in this thread
    19 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 15 Nov 2022
    https://github.com/koka-lang/koka Algebraic effects and reference counting. https://github.com/mit-plv/koika hardware description DSL for coq
    19 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 15 Nov 2022
    Koka, already cited in this thread, early 2010s. Koka's first claim to fame was a usable effect system (at the type were, basically, effect systems were not usable in practice; in fact few languages have managed to do as well as Koka since). Now its author is working on cool implementation strategies for functional languages as well.
  • [Offer] Tutoring for Computer Science / Programming / Software Engineering topics
    2 projects | /r/tutor | 3 Sep 2022
    I'm a software engineer with 3 years of professional experience. I worked for 2 years at Microsoft on Azure Compute and now work at Google, working on improving Google search. I am the sole maintainer of the popular open-source library microlens with 80k downloads. I've also contributed to the Koka programming language developed at Microsoft Research.
  • Implementing the Perceus reference counting GC
    5 projects | dev.to | 24 Jun 2022
    By implementing all of those optimizations in the Koka programming language, they achieved GC overhead much less and execution time faster than the other languages including OCaml, Haskell, and even C++ in several algorithms and data structures that frequently keep common sub-structures of them, such as red-black trees. For more information, see the latest version of the paper.
  • Creator of SerenityOS announces new Jakt programming language effort
    17 projects | /r/programming | 20 May 2022
    5) https://github.com/koka-lang/koka
    17 projects | /r/programming | 20 May 2022
  • Structurally-Typed Condition Handling
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2022
    Yes -- I think historically the power of condition handling was not well understood and algebraic effect handlers were a "rediscovery" coming from well-studied category theory (Plotkin, Power, and Pretnar).

    If you want to play with "structurally typed condition handling", then the Koka language has "row-typed algebraic effect handlers" that compile to C: <http://koka-lang.org>

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 2024-04-03.
  • Autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2024
    > OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”

    If that’s this OCaml, it has a configure.ac file in the root directory, which looks suspicious for an Autotools-free package: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml

  • 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.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing koka and ocaml you can also consider the following projects:

effekt - A research language with effect handlers and lightweight effect polymorphism

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

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

wasm-effect-handlers - WebAssembly specification, reference interpreter, and test suite with effect handlers extension.

FStar - A Proof-oriented Programming Language

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

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

dafny - Dafny is a verification-aware programming language

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

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.