esy

As someone who wrote a fair amount of Rust and OCaml code, I have to agree with the author. While working at Routine (YC W21), I was tasked with porting our core library to iOS to minimize duplication of business logic. This was a lucky opportunity to write something resembling a compiler: it took in schemas described with our in-house data exchange library and generated C (for FFI) and Swift code (for the end users, i.e., iOS developers). Since Routine uses OCaml for everything (which was a big motivator for joining the company—I wanted to see how that would work out), I wrote it in OCaml. The end result is a 3-5k LOC project. It's by no means a full compiler, but it was lots of fun to write. The language got in the way incredibly rarely. On average, it made my life a lot easier. We did encounter our fair share of issues, mostly due to t

What's the current status of Esy? https://github.com/esy/esy Any plans to backport its design back to Opam?

It's great to hear that Opam is making progress! I just wished that it would be more deeply integrated with Dune. A package manager that doesn't build is not very useful to be honest. Currently the only way to not have to care about switches and be able to clearly specify dependencies is to use the esy package manager[1] (which had lock files a while ago). With their work on Rust I can only hope they get inspired by Cargo. It's also interesting to see that they're working a lot with Rust. I've seen a lot of OCaml people switching to Rust or getting more and more into Rust, I'm wondering what this means for OCaml. [1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

There are some really cool projects popping up with ReasonML - here are a few: - A package manager like NPM, but for native code: https://github.com/esy/esy - A fast Node version manager: https://github.com/Schniz/fnm - A fast replacement for dotenv-cli: https://github.com/ulrikstrid/reenv - A fast JS bundler: https://github.com/fastpack/fastpack - A native language server: https://github.com/jaredly/reason-language-server The OCaml language and toolchain is very powerful... and I do believe ReasonML makes it more approachable, at least for a wider audience of developers comfortable with JavaScript-style syntax.

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