virt-v2v VS react-elm-components

In virt-v2v we eventually enforced that every module file also has a corresponding interface file: https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v/blob/master/check-mli...

You can look at the project yourself: https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v I've been writing OCaml for 20+ years and C for 40 years.

I develop in OCaml from time to time, and it's pretty practical. Separate compilation, makes small-ish binaries that most people wouldn't know weren't written in C/C++, easily call out to C if you need to. We steer clear of the more complex language features like functors because they confuse most programmers.

Here's an example of one very widely used production application: https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v/tree/master/v2v

XPath is the real killer feature for XML. I don't think it's possible to use it in this particular example, but in the more generally useful cases where you want to pull (eg) all subnodes with key matching a particular string, XPath is great.

Here's it being used in real code (search for "xpath_"):

https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v/blob/master/v2v/parse...

https://github.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v/blob/master/v2v/parse...

They were considered, I was on the team that considered them. (I work at Culture Amp and at one point was leading the Design System team).

To be clear: embedding Elm in React is easy (we host the main NPM library for doing so: https://github.com/cultureamp/react-elm-components). But embedding React in Elm is harder, as Elm doesn't give any easy "escape hatches" to interact with native JS code.

The main opportunity is to use Web Components. Elm knows how to render any HTML component, including `x-my-custom-button`, which could render using React or something else. We looked into options for this, including prototyping https://www.npmjs.com/package/backstitch as a way to embed our React components as Web Components for consumption in Elm. (No open source packages existed to do this at the time).

We also did quite a deep dive on using Stencil, which has a React-like API, to create web components for both React and Elm - even including publishing new plugins for the ecosystem to generate Elm bindings for your web components. Kevin went into some of the detail for this in the post if you're interested.