book VS ocaml

Some of your questions might be answered in this book (free online version): https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

I don't think they're wrong

the Jane Street side are quite prolific with blog posts etc

as a newcomer to OCaml one of the first, and nicer-looking, intro resources you'll likely encounter is the Real World OCaml book https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ which unfortunately does everything using Base instead of the stdlib

Personally that didn't sit right to me and I prefer to use the stdlib by default (which seems fine and not in need of a wholesale replacement)

This is an oldie but a goodie.

OCaml has, unlike Standard ML, grown quite a lot since this page was made.

In particular, the section "Standard libraries", I'd recommend looking at:

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

A couple of places where the comparison is outdated:

- OCaml using Base [1] allows for result-type oriented programming

- OCaml using Base uses less language magic and more module system

While there was and is truth to the distinction that SML is for scientists and OCaml is for engineers, this dichotomy is getting dated: OCaml is under active development, which means that scientists who want better tooling will choose OCaml. For example, 1ML [2] by Andreas Rossberg was built in OCaml.

[1]: https://opensource.janestreet.com/base/

Real World OCaml (version 2 is finally out) is also pretty good.

Real World OCaml is also a good resource, geared more towards people who already have some programming experience and want a more industry/practical focused learning experience.

ocaml.org’s new website is packed with lots of great early intros.

most learners eventually gravitate towards Real World OCaml https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ for additional learning.

Unfortunately, the learning resources for different domains out there isn’t as highly curated or prolific as, say, rust. If you do web dev like me, it takes a bit more work to find the tools and put them together. But the language itself lends itself well to systems level programming.

Fortunately, the forum is a great help.

In general, better read the second edition which is updated to use current Core versions. A print version was published recently.

I recommend https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ and https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html

Elm is not dead. It just prefers a slow release schedule but is still actively worked on in the background.

That said, you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming. Super fast compiler, great performance, can target both native and JS.

It is easier to use than Haskell due to defaulting to eager evaluation (like most languages) strategy instead of laziness and being generally more pragmatic, offering more escape hatches into the imperative world if need be. Plus great upward trajectory with lot's of cool stuff like an effects system and multi-core support coming.

Real World Ocaml is a decent resource: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

> 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

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)

11. OCaml - $91,026

> 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.

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:

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

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).

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.

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.