5 ms·

This is HUGE! Thanks to everyone at Facebook who worked on this. You guys are awesome. Also: The fact that this is written primarily in OCaml (as opposed to J

This is HUGE! Thanks to everyone at Facebook who worked on this. You guys are awesome. Also: The fact that this is written primarily in OCaml (as opposed to JS) is an excellent example of people choosing the right tool for the job.

nevir 12y ago
IMO OCaml is the wrong tool for the job in this case (even if it is a better language for this sort of tool). JavaScript has a weird ecosystem where it is extremely helpful to have all of your tools in the same language. browser-based IDEs, Node, portability, etc, and just one fewer runtime to juggle. Same reasons why closure is awkward as a Java program.
- lpw25 12y ago
  OCaml has excellent compile-to-JavaScript support. Facebook use this to compile their Hack type-checker for an in-browser IDE. I imagine they do something similar for Flow.
  - avsm 12y ago
    They do indeed use js_of_ocaml in the Flow test suite to compile the full Flow parser to JavaScript and then test that. See the related discussion on packaging it in the OPAM pull request: https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/pull/3083 https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository/pull/3083
uxwtf 12y ago
OCaml was used for implementation of the Opa framework some years ago https://github.com/MLstate/opalang https://github.com/MLstate/opalang