Ppx_deriving Alternatives

ppx_deriving reviews and mentions

• Pain Points of OCaml
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2025

  Format is part of OCaml stdlib. You can write formatters for it manually.

  Derivers are a library yes, it's pretty widespread if you need derive functionality, and it can derive basic functions. Proper link:

  https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ppx_deriving?tab=readme-ov-file...

• My Thoughts on OCaml
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2023

  > You gave a beautiful answer about programming language

  You do the same thing as in Rust, Scala or Haskell and derive the printer [1]. Then at the callsite, if you know the type then you do `T.show` to print it or `T.eq`. If you don't know the type, then you pass it in at the top level as a module and then do `T.show` or `T.eq`.

  > Or to convert one type into another type?

  If you want to convert a type, then you have a type that you want to convert from such as foo and bar, then you do `Foo.to_bar value`.

  We can keep going, but you can get the point.

  You _can't_ judge a language by doing what you want to do with one language in another. If I judge Rust by writing recursive data structures and complaining about performance and verbosity that's not particularly fair correct? I can't say that Dart is terrible for desktop because I can't use chrome developer tools on its canvas output and ignore it's hot-reloading server. I can't say Common Lisp code is unreadable because I don't have type annotations and ignore the REPL for introspection.

  [1] https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ppx_deriving

• Is rust serde unique?
  6 projects | /r/rust | 19 Apr 2023

  Ocaml has the amazing ppx_deriving which can be used for serialization / deserialization in various formats.

• Question on type declaration syntax
  2 projects | /r/ocaml | 17 Apr 2023

  I wrote a CLI tool and I'd like to produce statically linked binaries of my tool. However, I cannot do this because I'm using the ppx_deriving deriving preprocessor, and I cannot produce a statically linked executable while using this package.

• OCaml at First Glance
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Aug 2022

  Not great, not terrible; the language supports annotations which mean nothing to the compiler but which pre-processors can take advantage of, and there is a framework called ppx which you can use to write your own preprocessor. There exist many pre-processors to do things like add inline tests, generate getter/setter/pretty-printing functions, and so on. Here is an example:

  https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ppx_deriving

• Bad documentation of Jane Street libraries
  3 projects | /r/ocaml | 23 Mar 2022

  is from https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ppx_deriving

• Recommended method for pretty-printing collections in Core?
  2 projects | /r/ocaml | 9 Oct 2021

  Have you tried to derive a print function using https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ppx_deriving

• How do I define ordering for my sum types?
  1 project | /r/ocaml | 27 Apr 2021

  However, there is a ppx (a pre-processor) which can do the job : ppx_deriving. You just have to anotate your type in oder to get the compare function automatically generated :

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