opam VS esy

Compare opam vs esy and see what are their differences.

opam

opam is a source-based package manager. It supports multiple simultaneous compiler installations, flexible package constraints, and a Git-friendly development workflow. (by ocaml)

esy

package.json workflow for native development with Reason/OCaml (by esy)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
opam esy
11 8
1,177 837
1.4% 0.2%
9.6 9.2
6 days ago 5 days ago
OCaml Reason
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.

opam

Posts with mentions or reviews of opam. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-12-29.

esy

Posts with mentions or reviews of esy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-07.
  • Compiler Development: Rust or OCaml?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2023
    As someone who wrote a fair amount of Rust and OCaml code, I have to agree with the author.

    While working at Routine (YC W21), I was tasked with porting our core library to iOS to minimize code duplication. This was a lucky opportunity to write something resembling a compiler: it took in schemas described with our in-house data exchange library and generated C (for FFI) and Swift code (for the end-users, i.e., iOS developers).

    Since Routine uses OCaml for everything (which was a big motivator for joining the company—I wanted to see how that would work out), I wrote it in OCaml. The end result is a 3-5k LOC project. It's by no means a full compiler, but it was lots of fun to write. The language got in the way incredibly rarely. On average, it made my life a lot easier.

    We did encounter our fair share of issues, mostly due to the cross-compilation tooling (we initially used esy [1], flirted with Nix, and eventually switched to opam-cross-ios [2]), third-party libraries, and intricacies of FFI. Those do take their toll on sanity.

    [1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

  • OCaml 5.0 release (including multicore and effects)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2022
    What's the current status of Esy? https://github.com/esy/esy

    Any plans to backport its design back to Opam?

  • 2021 at OCamlPro
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2022
    It's great to hear that Opam is making progress! I just wished that it would be more deeply integrated with Dune. A package manager that doesn't build is not very useful to be honest. Currently the only way to not have to care about switches and be able to clearly specify dependencies is to use the esy package manager[1] (which had lock files a while ago).

    [1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

  • PR to Merge Multicore OCaml
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Dec 2021
    If you start a project today I would really try to use esy (https://esy.sh/)

    I actually don’t use it myself but it seems to bring the modern programming language experience to OCaml

  • Getting Started with OCaml in 2021 · Perpetually Curious Blog
    2 projects | /r/ocaml | 1 Nov 2021
    Another alternative is to use esy but I'm clearly biased here....
    2 projects | /r/ocaml | 1 Nov 2021
    Here is link number 1 - Previous text "esy"
  • Frustrated by lacking cross platform support (hoping to be wrong)
    4 projects | /r/ocaml | 1 Aug 2021
    Alternatively, you can use esy.sh for a simpler setup/build process (it does not require running in a Cygwin shell).
  • Opam, PNPM, Node, Esy, Docker, ReactNative on 128GB Mac
    4 projects | dev.to | 23 Jan 2021
    Running esy does not work. Apparently, my environment does not know that it is there. Anyone know what is going on here? I have posted this in the discussion for esy@next here. I will get back to you all when I figure this out.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing opam and esy you can also consider the following projects:

dune - A composable build system for OCaml.

termux-packages - A package build system for Termux.

mirage - MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels

domainslib - Parallel Programming over Domains

fnm - 🚀 Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in Rust

opam-repository - Main public package repository for opam, the source package manager of OCaml.

eioio - Effects-based direct-style IO for multicore OCaml

proof-systems - The proof systems used by Mina

Cargo - The Rust package manager

ocaml-multicore - Multicore OCaml

drom - drom is a wrapper over opam/dune in an attempt to provide a cargo-like user experience. It can be used to create full OCaml projects with sphinx and odoc documentation. It has specific knowledge of Github and will generate files for Github Actions CI and Github pages.