opam

> * OPAM. In theory... I feel like it should be great. But in practice I find it to be incomprehensible, full of surprising behaviours, and also surprisingly buggy. I still can't believe the bug where it can't find `curl` if you're in more than 32 Unix groups. I couldn’t believe this was an actual bug in opam, and I found it: https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/5373 I don’t think that’s an opam bug, it’s an issue with musl, and they just happened to build their binaries with it.

OCaml can generate binaries that do not depend on Cygwin runtimes, and that's a common way to ship binaries. There are a number of development shops who have been doing that for years. For development on Windows, Cygwin is commonly used for "casual" use, and can be tricky to get working if you're not familiar with the quirks of that toolchain. That's going to improve quite rapidly though: I just announced that our development focus from the OCaml Platform for opam (our package manager) is to get Windows support working end-to-end. There aren't any real blockers to Windows support except for building a critical mass of developers to smooth out the thousands of details that get in the way right now: you can find more here: https://github.com/ocaml/opam/wiki/opam-2.2-slides.pdf From a compiler developer's perspective, the number of variati

> Wasn't `oasis` the legacy way of building projects? Thought everyone used `dune` now? Yeah, I believe new projects tend to use dune, and some older projects have switched from OASIS to dune. I personally still use OASIS mainly due to laziness. :D > But I need a quality material on everything you can do with `dune`. Can you recommend such? I have not used dune myself, but a quick glance at these sites suggests that they may be quite useful: - https://dune.build/ - https://dune.build/examples - https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ - https://github.com/ocaml/dune/blob/master/doc/quick-start.rs... - https://github.com/ocaml/dune/tree/master/example - https://ocamlverse.github.io/content/quickstart_ocaml_projec... - https://medium.com/@bobbypriambodo/starting-an-ocaml-app-pro... For opam: - https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/FAQ.html - https://opa

Not intentionally malware. But the OPAM install [0] deleted my $PATH, and it took me a while how to fix that one. They've since fixed what allowed the problem to happen [1], well it was a combination of that (normal shell problems) and a power-outage that killed the installer just before completion (in which case the script may just think it's complete). But I'm sure similar catastrophic side-effects can occur in other install scripts out there. [0] https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html [1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2165

Speaking of problems, in my opinions the three biggest are: - Lack of automatic multicore scheduling, this is going to be solved with OCaml multicore project [1] - Lack of updated GUI libraries. There is LablGTK [2], but it stuck to GTK+ 2 version. The main developer started [3] to work on GTK+ 3 version support, but it is still at the very beginning. - Bad Windows platform support [4] (grep for "Windows" word at this page) and [5]. With upcoming opam-2.0 [6] release the support will be slightly better though. [1] https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-multicore [2] https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk [3] https://github.com/garrigue/lablgtk/issues/2 [4] https://caml.inria.fr/mantis/roadmap_page.php [5] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Ai... [6] http://opam.ocaml.org/blog/opam-2-0-0-repo-upgrade-roadmap/

I'd say if you ever get the time again, give OCaml another look. The toolchain experience has been improving at a rapid pace! I started to explore OCaml again earlier this year and the day to day tooling around it has felt at par or better than my experience with other languages. Between Opam [1], Dune[2] and utop[3] the "new comer experience" has been really good so far. The editor integration with vim/emacs has been top notch, and visual studio code has turned into a really nice option as well for people who don't like vim/emacs. I'm sure there is still room for improvement, but i'd say its atleast heading in the right direction! [1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam [2] https://github.com/ocaml/dune [3] https://github.com/diml/utop [4] https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ocamlformat

tread carefully in combination with other software. Trying to install opam for Ocaml completely broke my fish shell config, the bug seems to remain unfixed for two years now. https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2255 This is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to use fish again, these edge cases just aren't tolerable for everyday work.

I wonder, what are the pluses of F# that missing in more mature and widely adopted OCaml? Why to create a clone of good language? With porting opam to Windows platform [1], along with improving the Unicode support [2] in it I'd say it has a bigger potential in this field. [1] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191 [2] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/153

Wouldn't Xetex + fontspec take care of that, including unicode needs? Though, I'm curious what comes of this. Currently the "official" install/build method via make fails on my mac (sierra - could be some other issue) and on top of that 'opam init' (?) completely broke the fish path evaluation (not Patoline's fault, I guess). Manual fish fix: https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2255.

ironically, the instructions there don't tell you how to get opam installed on windows either. i don't know the answer, but apparently [it's not trivial](https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/246)

It would be nice if they'll make it work on Windows platforms. There is already an issue for that[1]. It also depends from the Windows support in OCaml itself and opam[2]. [1] https://github.com/facebook/reason/issues/470 [2] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191

I hope after this release they will start improving OCaml support for Windows too (mostly smoothless opam experience, like the package managers for other languages) https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191

And here is the pending effort for better experience of OCaml on Windows: https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191

One of the main stoppers of the wider OCaml adoption, I think, is a poor Windows support. For example, missing Unicode support [1] or lack of the opam [2] on this platform. [1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/153 [2] https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/2191