bsb-native

One thing I’ll add on top of the other comments is that the Reason community has been trying hard to build tools and libraries for people who are building products. Doing that for two reasons: 1) Most of Reason contributors are actually working on a product, and contribute to Reason on the side (20% or personal time kinda thing) 2) Product driven dev allows us to build simpler things that solve real problems that people have :) This means that the Reason tools are less powerful but also simpler. In particular I’m thinking of bsb (https://bucklescript.github.io/docs/en/build-overview.html#d...) and bsb-native (https://github.com/bsansouci/bsb-native), the latter’s a simple fork of the former that adds support for building to native. Bsb is simple and thanks to that very fast and easy to setup.

> This should be possible with something like bsb-native (https://github.com/bsansouci/bsb-native) Why not just use the real OCaml/Reason compiler ... ?

With pure Reason (No JS bindings) it should be possible to skip Node / Bucklescript on the server and compile straight to binary. This should be possible with something like bsb-native (https://github.com/bsansouci/bsb-native) I haven't tried this because I don't have a pure Reason project

There are definitely individuals exploring the native-compilation story, for instance bsb-native[0] allows BuckleScript to use OCaml's native compilation tools. Jared Forsyth has also been publishing a lot of material[1] about creating cross-platform project using ReasonML. The ReasonML team seem to be taking a conservative approach towards what they officially release. They want to make sure that they have a really good plan on how and where to move forward with each of these stories - async, native compilation, cross-platform project, optimizations, etc. Right now they seem to be focusing on creating a really high quality platform for building front-end web applications, but all of these things are on their mind. I'm actually reminded of the fact that Jordan Walke (initial creator of React) is currently working on a native OCaml/Reason