opam-alpha-repository VS ocaml

Compare opam-alpha-repository vs ocaml and see what are their differences.

opam-alpha-repository

A test opam overlay containing packages compatible with the next release of the OCaml compiler (by kit-ty-kate)

ocaml

The core OCaml system: compilers, runtime system, base libraries (by ocaml)
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opam-alpha-repository ocaml
2 118
14 5,127
- 2.0%
3.8 9.9
3 days ago 3 days ago
Shell OCaml
- 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.

opam-alpha-repository

Posts with mentions or reviews of opam-alpha-repository. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-09-30.
  • Practical OCaml, Multicore Edition
    3 projects | dev.to | 30 Sep 2022
    # 'mc' is just a short name we choose # We need to explicitly add the opam alpha repository with higher priority than the default repo, to allow installing some multicore-only libraries: opam switch create mc 5.0.0~alpha1 --repositories=mc=git+https://github.com/kit-ty-kate/opam-alpha-repository.git,default eval $(opam env) opam install dune utop eio
  • OCaml 5.0.0, zeroth alpha release
    4 projects | /r/ocaml | 15 Jun 2022

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 2024-03-17.
  • 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.
    4 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 22 May 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing opam-alpha-repository and ocaml 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.

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dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

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

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

koka - Koka language compiler and interpreter

rescript-compiler - The compiler for ReScript.

go - The Go programming language

awesome-cl - A curated list of awesome Common Lisp frameworks, libraries and other shiny stuff.

tokio - A runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. Provides I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, ...