ocaml VS rfcs

Compare ocaml vs rfcs and see what are their differences.

ocaml

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries (by ocaml)
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ocaml rfcs
119 666
5,156 5,700
1.6% 1.1%
9.9 9.8
3 days ago about 17 hours ago
OCaml Markdown
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
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.

rfcs

Posts with mentions or reviews of rfcs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-25.
  • Ask HN: What April Fools jokes have you noticed this year?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    RFC: Add large language models to Rust

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3603

  • Rust to add large language models to the standard library
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
  • Why does Rust choose not to provide `for` comprehensions?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
    Man, SO and family has really gone downhill. That top answer is absolutely terrible. In fact, if you care, you can literally look at the RFC discussion here to see the actual debate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/582

    Basically, `for x in y` is kind of redundant, already sorta-kinda supported by itertools, and there's also a ton of macros that sorta-kinda do it already. It would just be language bloat at this point.

    Literally has nothing to do with memory management.

  • Coroutines in C
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
  • Uv: Python Packaging in Rust
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    Congrats!

    > Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

    Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

    Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

    > uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

    > uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

    This is great to see though!

    I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

    While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

    How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

  • RFC: Rust Has Provenance
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
  • The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2024
    In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

  • Why stdout is faster than stderr?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2024
    I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

    Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

  • Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: What's the fastest programming language with a large standard library?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

    Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

    You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

    [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

    [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

    [3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

    [4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

    [5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

    [6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ocaml and rfcs 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.

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

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

bubblewrap - Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

crates.io - The Rust package registry

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

polonius - Defines the Rust borrow checker.

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

Rust-for-Linux - Adding support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel.

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

rust-gc - Simple tracing (mark and sweep) garbage collector for Rust