ocaml VS melange

Compare ocaml vs melange and see what are their differences.

ocaml

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

melange

A mixture of tooling combined to produce JavaScript from OCaml & Reason (by melange-re)
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ocaml melange
119 14
5,156 752
1.6% 3.5%
9.9 9.7
5 days ago 7 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.

melange

Posts with mentions or reviews of melange. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-27.
  • Melange for React devs book, alpha release
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    Hey HN, at Ahrefs we have been working on an online book that hopefully helps React developers get up and running with Melange, an OCaml to JavaScript compiler. You can read more about Melange here: https://melange.re/.

    There are still a few chapters that we'd like to add before considering it "complete", but it might be already helpful for some folks out there, that's why we decided to publish it early.

    The book uses Reason syntax to implement React components using ReasonReact components. You can read more about both in:

    https://reasonml.github.io/

  • Reason and React Meta-Frameworks
    5 projects | dev.to | 17 Oct 2023
    In my previous post on trying to use the NextJS App Router and Reason I described some of the problems and limitations of their compatibility with one another. With the release of Melange 2 I decided to see if the new features of Melange 2 could help to increase the compatibility of Reason and the NextJS App Router. I have also documented some of the things learnt after trying Melange (v1) with Astro and Remix.
  • GitHub - melange-re/melange: A mixture of tooling combined to produce JavaScript from OCaml & Reason
    1 project | /r/programming | 16 Jun 2022
  • OCaml 5.0 Alpha Release
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jun 2022
    So it's Reason, not ReasonML which the umbrella project's name, and Rescript is a imcompatible syntax split from the Bucklescript team (that previously transpiled Reason to JS). Bucklescript's new name is... Rescript.

    But not everyone agrees with the split and work is being done on Melange to replace Bucklescript : https://github.com/melange-re/melange

    Ultimately JsOfOcaml can directly transpile Ocaml to JS.

  • Question about the Reason project in general
    3 projects | /r/rescript | 4 Feb 2022
    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.
  • From TypeScript to ReScript
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jan 2022
    There is a fork of ReScript that supports ReasonML syntax and with the goal of maintaining Ocaml compatibility: https://github.com/melange-re/melange.
  • From object-oriented JS to functional ReScript
    1 project | /r/javascript | 4 Dec 2021
    There's also a fork of BuckleScript/ReScript called Melange that guts its build system so that instead of using ninja, it works with more standard tools for the ecosystem, specifically dune and esy. In doing so they managed to also finally get the compiler off of OCaml 4.06: now it can use a newer OCaml compiler and take advantage of four years worth of language and compiler improvements.
  • Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages? (2003)
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2021
  • Writing custom VSCode extensions in ReasonML
    2 projects | /r/reasonml | 21 Jul 2021
    For OCaml and ReasonML your options are js_of_ocaml (mentioned here in ReasonML docs) or a fairly new fork of BuckleScript called melange. They differ in implementation and output, with JSOO taking intermediate bytecode generated by ocamlc and turning it into unreadable JS, vs Melange being a patched compiler that builds more human-readable JS.
  • Using `let.opt` in Rescript with latest Reason/OCaml
    3 projects | dev.to | 11 Jul 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ocaml and melange 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.

js_of_ocaml - Compiler from OCaml to Javascript.

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

rescript-compiler - The compiler for ReScript.

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

reason - Simple, fast & type safe code that leverages the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems

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

Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).

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

haxe - Haxe - The Cross-Platform Toolkit

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

vscode-ocaml-platform - Visual Studio Code extension for OCaml