reagents VS reason

The 1978 paper proposes a reasonable set of primitives and then walks through prose examples with them. The book proposes roughly the same primitives (channels are the big change, but stop is barely in the paper) and describes them in a formal notation for state machines. It's the difference between a sketch of a plausible idea and writing down the mathematics.

Related though much later, ocaml https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/reagents observed that the send/recv primitives make less sense than a swap primitive. Between occam and the current ocaml effort, concurrent ML is the same sort of model with the details really well thought through (e.g. a thread executing stop gets garbage collected).

Still early days, but I had done some exploratory work in the past on Reagents, a composable lock-free library [1]. Now that OCaml 5 is released, we're reviving this work.

It's semantics is weaker than STM -- unlike STM, it doesn't provide serializability but Reagents can compile down to multi-word compare and swap operations, which can be implemented with the help of hardware transactions (when present) or efficient software implementations of it [2]. Hence, Reagent programs should be faster than STM.

[1] https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/reagents

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/

ReScript is "Fast, Simple, Fully Typed JavaScript from the Future". What that means is that ReScript has a lightning fast compiler, an easy to learn JS like syntax, strong static types, with amazing features like pattern matching and variant types. Until 2020 it was called "BuckleScript" and is closely related to ReasonML.

This tracks with how I've seen "normal" languages converge on similar, flawed imitations of better type systems through tools and repurposed syntax. Thank you for confirming.

Do you have any recommendations or warnings regarding general languages which reach in the opposite direction? Reason[1] and F#[2] are both examples: they attach pre-existing ecosystems and compile-for-$PLATFORM tools to OCaml-like typing.

OCaml itself is also intriguing for personal projects. However, I'm worried the "GPL" in its standard library's LGPL license might scare people despite both the linking exception and Jane Street's MIT alternative.

1. https://reasonml.github.io/

ReasonML purely as a syntax layer on top of OCaml is still being updated and released[1]. Incidentally, I'm one of the maintainers of that project too :-)

With this Melange release, we're hoping to somewhat revive ReasonML and channel some folks back to the community from the perspective of a vertically integrated platform that has seen major investment in the past few years.

[1]: https://github.com/reasonml/reason

Why not use https://reasonml.github.io/ instead? Or just use Typescript?

Quieted down, but I depend on projects with worst graphs:

https://github.com/reasonml/reason/graphs/contributors

There is also reasonml for Web development.