ocaml-containers VS base

YMMV. Există extensii: Base, Containers. Pentru I/O ai Lwt sau Async.

It focuses on Jane Street's alternate standard library, Base, which means you're not quite learning OCaml, you're learning a distorted dialect of it that is mostly the same but with a lot of unique, opinionated design decisions chosen by Jane Street developers to suit their company's workflow. If you want to use Base you pretty much have to opt in to its way of doing things and pulling in a lot of extra code, so I think it's better to learn OCaml first, then learn Jane Street's way, especially since OCaml's stdlib has grown and improved a good bit since the time when Base was made and RWO originally written. Plus there's also containers now, which is a stdlib extension that lets you cherry-pick the things you want in a more self-contained way that builds on what OCaml provides instead of trying to replace it.

Fortunately, there is Containers which gets the argument ordering right.

Instead of either, you might be interested in Containers. It's more like an extension of the OCaml stdlib where you can cherry-pick what you want to use instead of having to go all-or-nothing. Adds a lot of useful things but not in the opinionated "let's make OCaml a different language" way that Base does.

Same can be said of containers, which extends the stdlib rather than replaces or changes it. It's not fragmentation, it's a "batteries included" utility library that works with the stdlib.

I'm not a fan of some of the opinionated things it does and find it bloats the executables a bit much for my liking, but it is coherent and nicely made. I was looking into trying Batteries instead but someone suggested containers and it seems more modular and an extension of the stdlib rather than a replacement, which is more to my liking.

For writing a self-contained library, people generally stick to stdlib (and occasionally some lightweight stdlib alternatives, e.g. containers - https://github.com/c-cube/ocaml-containers). Personally, I use containers a fair bit for libraries, but not as a full stdlib replacement.

I'm very much not a serious OCaml:er but when I've dabbled some in it I got the impression that their "standard library" is kind of the de facto standard library.

https://github.com/janestreet/base

I don’t know OCaml, or really any language that would help me fully understand the code, but my exposure to OCaml is this stuff, and it looks pretty clean to me. https://github.com/janestreet/base

Of course, I haven’t read every file, so maybe I got lucky with my random sampling.

Real World OCaml uses Base to replace OCaml's stdlib. I am not very fond of Base since it deviates from the standard convention of passing functions before values in HOC. To fix the ordering, one has to use labels:

As far as standard library usage goes, I highly recommend using Base. Instead of implementing list_of_string, you could use Base.String.to_list. Even if you don't end up using Base, you can get the same thing from the built in standard library by doing String.to_seq then List.of_seq.