ocaml VS eioio

Compare ocaml vs eioio and see what are their differences.

ocaml

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries (by ocaml)

eioio

Effects-based direct-style IO for multicore OCaml (by ocaml-multicore)
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ocaml eioio
119 25
5,156 517
1.6% 4.1%
9.9 9.1
4 days ago 21 days ago
OCaml 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.

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
    > 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

  • Notes about the ongoing Perl logo discussion
    1 project | dev.to | 9 Jul 2023
    An amazing example is Ocaml lang logo / mascot. It might be useful to talk with them to know what was the process behind this work. The About page camel head on Perl dot org header is also a pretty good example of simplification, but it's not a logo, just a friendly illustration, as the O'Reilly camel is. Another notable logo for this animal is the well known tobacco industry company, but don't get me started on that (“good” logo, though, if we look at the effectiveness of their marketing).
  • 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.

eioio

Posts with mentions or reviews of eioio. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-12.
  • Eio 1.0 Release: Introducing a new Effects-Based I/O Library for OCaml
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Mar 2024
    the actual project (Readme has some code samples): https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio
  • OCaml: a Rust developer's first impressions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    For 5.0+ you might want to look at https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio for how effects can make async much more pleasant
  • Alternatives to scala FP
    5 projects | /r/scala | 12 Jun 2023
  • How Much Memory Do You Need to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks?
    2 projects | /r/programming | 21 May 2023
    Great post! I would love to see this extended to OCaml 5 (with eio) and Haskell
  • Eio -- Effects-Based Parallel IO for OCaml
    1 project | /r/ocaml | 29 Dec 2022
    1 project | /r/ocaml | 29 Dec 2022
  • OCaml 5.0.0: multicore support and effect handlers for OCaml
    2 projects | /r/programming | 16 Dec 2022
    Second, effects enable a new style of concurrency libraries like eio that forgoes the need to wrap every asynchronous computation in a monad.
  • OCaml 5.0 Multicore is out
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2022
  • What’s so great about functional programming anyway?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2022
    > This is realllly unidiomatic in real world Haskell.

    Whether idiomatic or not does not matter. It proves my point:

    IO won't save you, and even very mundane effects are not part of the game…

    Idris is the "better Haskell" sure, but the effect tracking is still part of the uncanny valley (still IO monad based).

    Koka is a toy, and Frank mostly "only a paper" (even there is some code out there).

    The "Frank concept" is to some degree implemented in the Unison language, though:

    https://www.unison-lang.org/learn/fundamentals/abilities/

    Having a notion of co-effects (or however you please to call them) is imho actually much more important than talking about effects (as effects are in fact neither values nor types—something that all the IO kludges get wrong).

    I think the first practicable approach in the mainstream about this topic will be what gets researched and developed for Scala. The main take away is that you need to look at things form the co-effects side first and foremost!

    In case anybody is interested in what happens in Scala land in this regard:

    https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/aLE9M37d...

    https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/cc...

    But also the development in OCaml seems interesting:

    https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio#design-note-capabilit...

    Look mom, "effects", but without the monad headache!

  • Practical OCaml, Multicore Edition
    3 projects | dev.to | 30 Sep 2022
    To enable access to all these features, an exciting new library called Eio is being developed. It uses a new paradigm of direct-style concurrent I/O programming, without the need for monads or async/await, thus avoiding the function colour problem.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ocaml and eioio 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.

ocaml-multicore - Multicore OCaml

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

roast - 🦋 Raku test suite

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

loom - Concurrency permutation testing tool for Rust.

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

domainslib - Parallel Programming over Domains

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

rescript-compiler - The compiler for ReScript.

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

effects-examples - Examples to illustrate the use of algebraic effects in Multicore OCaml