7 ms·

This is what I thought about OCaml when I first tried in 2001. I still do.

• zesterer 2y ago
  It's no accident that Rust's bootstrap compiler was written in OCaml. Rust borrows a lot of ideas from it. Arguably, OCaml and ML are closer ancestors of the language than C. I like Rust, I use it as much as I can. But, it actually doesn't bring many new features to the table. What it's done is successfully learn from the past, scooping up the good ideas and ditching the bad ones. Its real selling point is how it wraps all of those old ideas up into a modern, well-maintained, stable package that's ready for use in the real world.
  • satvikpendem 2y ago
    To be fair, many languages have their bootstrapper written in OCaml or another similar ML. When I took my programming language interpreters and compilers classes, that's what they mentioned to us, because they are uniquely good at writing recursive descent parsers.
  • pdimitar 2y ago
    > What it's done is successfully learn from the past, scooping up the good ideas and ditching the bad ones. Its real selling point is how it wraps all of those old ideas up into a modern, well-maintained, stable package that's ready for use in the real world. Which is no small feat. I wish OCaml cleaned house and settled on just one stdlib and removed a lot of legacy baggage, and oh yeah, add built-in Unicode support, and 5-6 other things I am forgetting now. Sure you can muscle through all that but having Rust around really makes you wonder if it's worth it and in my case I ultimately arrived at "nope, it is not" so I just use Elixir, Golang and Rust.