rescript VS reason

Compare rescript vs reason and see what are their differences.

rescript

ReScript is a robustly typed language that compiles to efficient and human-readable JavaScript. (by rescript-lang)

reason

Simple, fast & type safe code that leverages the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems (by reasonml)
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rescript reason
106 53
7,006 10,210
1.6% 0.2%
9.8 8.7
6 days ago 14 days ago
ReScript OCaml
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
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.

rescript

Posts with mentions or reviews of rescript. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-02.
  • An Ode to TypeScript Enums
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2025
    When I see this it makes me want to run for ReasonML/ReScript/Elm/PureScript.

    Sum types (without payloads on the instances they are effectively enums) should not require a evening filling ceremonial dance event to define.

    https://reasonml.github.io/

    https://rescript-lang.org/

    https://elm-lang.org/

    https://www.purescript.org/

    (any I forgot?)

    It's nice that TS is a strict super set of JS... But that's about the only reason TS is nice. Apart from that the "being a strict super set" hampers TS is a million and one ways.

    To my JS is too broken to fix with a strict super set.

  • JavaScript schema library from the Future 🧬
    18 projects | dev.to | 21 Feb 2025
    Interestingly, you probably think that calling eval itself is slow, and I thought this myself. However, it was actually not as slow as I expected. For example, creating a simple nested object schema and calling the parser once happened to be 1.8 times faster with ReScript Schema using eval than Zod. I really put a lot of effort into making it as fast as possible, and I have to thank the ReScript language and the people behind it for allowing me to write very performant and safe code.
  • How Jane Street accidentally built a better build system for OCaml
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
  • If Not React, Then What?
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2024
  • OCaml Syntax Sucks
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Nov 2024
    Fortunately, the OCaml compiler is very modular, and there have been efforts to make things more... reasonable.

    - Reason, a different syntactic frontend for regular OCaml: https://reasonml.github.io/

    - ReScript, a language with OCaml semantics that compiles into: JS https://rescript-lang.org/ (I suppose it's a reincarnation of js-of-ocaml).

  • TypeScript's Lack of Naming Types and Type Conversion in Angular
    6 projects | dev.to | 17 Oct 2024
    Elm, ReScript, F#, Ocaml, Scala… it’s just normal to name your types, then use them places. In fact, you’ll often create the types _before_ the code, even if you’re not really practicing DDD (Domain Driven Design). Yes, you’ll do many after the fact when doing functions, or you start testing things and decide to change your design, and make new types. Either way, it’s just “the norm”. You then do the other norms like “name your function” and “name your variables”. I’m a bit confused why it’s only 2 out of 3 (variables and functions, not types) in this TypeScript Angular project. I’ll have to look at other internal Angular projects and see if it’s common there as well.
  • How I host Elm web applications with GitHub Pages
    15 projects | dev.to | 17 Oct 2024
    A web application makes use of these same ingredients, i.e. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but it uses significantly more JavaScript. As the JavaScript powering your web application grows in size it can bring with it a variety of problems that a few languages, like TypeScript, ReScript, PureScript, and Elm, have attempted to solve. Each of the aforementioned compile to JavaScript languages have their pros and cons but it is beyond the scope of this article to get into those details. Suffice it to say, my preference is Elm. It is also not the goal of this article to convince you to use Elm but only to show you how Elm fits into the flow of creating a web application and hosting it on GitHub Pages. So let's continue by adding Elm to our project.
  • Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jul 2024
  • Dealing with Unicode string, done right and better.
    8 projects | dev.to | 15 Jun 2024
    Since JavaScript doesn't have a pattern-matching like Rust, it could be hard to replicate the same logic. I used the ReScript compiler to maintain the original logic as much as possible. It made me able to port it confidently. Specifically check_pair function can be converted into this.
  • ReScript: Fast, Simple Typed JavaScript from the Future
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2024

reason

Posts with mentions or reviews of reason. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-11.
  • A 10x Faster TypeScript
    38 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2025
    OCaml and Haskell already have that nice type system (and even more nice). If OCaml's syntax bothers you, there is Reason [1] which is a different frontend to the same compiler suite.

    Also in this space is Gleam [2] which targets Erlang / OTP, if high concurrency and fault tolerance is your cup of tea.

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

    [2]: https://gleam.run/

  • An Ode to TypeScript Enums
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2025
    When I see this it makes me want to run for ReasonML/ReScript/Elm/PureScript.

    Sum types (without payloads on the instances they are effectively enums) should not require a evening filling ceremonial dance event to define.

    https://reasonml.github.io/

    https://rescript-lang.org/

    https://elm-lang.org/

    https://www.purescript.org/

    (any I forgot?)

    It's nice that TS is a strict super set of JS... But that's about the only reason TS is nice. Apart from that the "being a strict super set" hampers TS is a million and one ways.

    To my JS is too broken to fix with a strict super set.

  • Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?
    38 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2025
    > The syntax is also not very friendly IMO.

    Very true. There's an alternate syntax for OCaml called "ReasonML" that looks much more, uh, reasonable: https://reasonml.github.io/

  • How Jane Street accidentally built a better build system for OCaml
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
  • OCaml Syntax Sucks
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Nov 2024
    I wish they would update their blog![0] The last post is from Aug. 2018, which definitely gives the impression that the project is dead.

    But it's not dead, if you look at their GitHub.[1]

    [0] https://reasonml.github.io/blog/

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

  • Comparing OCaml and Standard ML (2020)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2024
    OCaml makes so much sense to me -- it's just a shame that the syntax has some weird decisions.

    I wish ReasonML (https://reasonml.github.io/) would come back -- it's a new syntax for the same language, kind of an Elixir/Erlang thing.

  • ReScript has come a long way, maybe it's time to switch from TypeScript?
    4 projects | dev.to | 28 May 2024
    Ocaml is still a wonderful language if you want to look into it, and Reason is still going strong as an alternate syntax for OCaml. With either OCaml or Reason you can compile to native code, or use the continuation of BuckleScript now called Melange.
  • Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from React (2019)
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Feb 2024
  • Melange for React devs book, alpha release
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    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: Rust like features for JavaScript
    2 projects | dev.to | 18 Jan 2024
    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.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rescript and reason you can also consider the following projects:

TypeScript - TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output.

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

purescript - A strongly-typed language that compiles to JavaScript

refterm - Reference monospace terminal renderer

Fable: F# |> BABEL - F# to JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust and Dart Compiler

bs-mocha

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Did you know that ReScript is
the 86th most popular programming language
based on number of references?