dream

> It sounds like you read my statement as "run the exact same code in node or OCaml" which I agree would have been very hard. Hello! Indeed, I did misunderstand you. I agree that it was possible to share some parts of the code between Reason's JS target with BuckleScript, and native target with the stock OCaml compiler. I think a pretty reasonable number of people did that. Actually, it's still possible to this day even with ReScript e.g. https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-fulls... > Between the breaking changes and the general change in development philosophy...switching to the ReScript compiler for my project would have required nearly a complete rewrite. There were perhaps a couple of minor breaking changes but can you explain why it would have required a near complete rewrite? I wasn't aware of anything major like

> you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming Any tips on backend frameworks to look at? I need to write a small websocket service for a side-project and have always wanted to try OCaml. I came across https://github.com/aantron/dream.

The new hotness is Dream, which technically isn't 1.0 yet, but is very well documented and example'd https://aantron.github.io/dream/ https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example

Yes. OCaml + all of the 3 OCaml-to-JS compilers support OCaml syntax. Dream itself demonstrates: - Server and client both written in Reason, using ocamlc+Melange https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/r-fulls... That example could also have been written in OCaml syntax, because ocamlc (native) and Melange (JS) both support OCaml. However, Reason is nicer if you want to use React with JSX on the client. - Server and client both written in OCaml, using ocamlc+Js_of_ocaml https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-fulls... - The remaining example uses Ocaml on the server and ReScript on the client, using the ReScript compiler. However, you could use OCaml on the client with the ReScript compiler. Just as with Melange, you would lose access to nice JSX syntax https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-ful

Dream doesn't have much of a system call dependency footprint itself. It's basically just a convention for plugging request -> response functions into a web server. Some of its native dependencies will have to be replaced by Node equivalents. Soon after that, it would be portable to Node. There is already work underway to port Dream to Mirage, to run in unikernels: https://github.com/aantron/dream/pull/22 Lwt, Dream's promise library, is itself getting ported to run on top of libuv: https://github.com/ocsigen/lwt/issues/813 libuv is, of course, the I/O library that powers Node, so it might be practical to run Dream as a native node module very soon after doing this. (As an aside, I'm supposed to work on that libuv project, but instead I've been working on Dream :P)

AFAICT all of these are client-side frameworks. Dream is a server-side framework. I currently write my server with Dream and use regular JS React on the client. If you glance at most of Dream's examples that serve an interactive client, you will see that they serve JavaScript: https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/k-webso... You can use anything you want for the client, and I use the JS ecosystem heavily in my own usage. There are several full-stack OCaml examples, but that's entirely optional: https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example#full-st... As for server-side comparisons, OCaml is much easier for me to work with than, for example, TypeScript for many reasons. The first is that I can compile several hundred OCaml files, in the rare case of a full rebuild, in less time than running tsc incrementally on a smal

...and just to make it slightly more confusing, ReScript changed the ReasonML language somewhat, prompting another fork, Melange, which sticks with ReasonML. In any case, Dream has examples showing full-stack (OCaml client+server) usage with both ReScript and Melange: - ReScript: https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-fulls... - Melange: https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/r-fulls... For good measure, there is also an example with the other OCaml-to-JS compiler... - Js_of_ocaml: https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example/w-fulls...

That page doesn’t link to the examples in GitHub whose README [1] is unexpectedly informative, having its own roadmap. Anyone using this in anger? [1] https://github.com/aantron/dream/tree/master/example#readme