
Using, Understanding, and Unraveling the OCaml Language - rabidsnail
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/u3-ocaml/index.html
======
smabie
This is so old, I personally wouldn't read it. If you want to learn Ocaml,
probably the best current resource is Real World Ocaml v2:
[https://dev.realworldocaml.org/](https://dev.realworldocaml.org/). It doesn't
have good coverage of the not so real world things or the myriad of syntax
extensions (mostly from Jane Street). The main auther is one of the original
co-founders of Jane Street as well. The only reason I'm saying this is that
the Jane Streets guys steer the direction of the language heavily, and their
needs don't necessarily fit mine. Their standard library alternative Core
(which RWO uses) is a ton of code, pulling in hundreds of dependencies. This
leads to a native compiled hello world binary being over 20mb.

~~~
yawaramin
Do you mean Yaron Minsky? I don't think he was a co-founder of Jane Street.
From what he's said publicly I got the impression that he was a hire (who
obviously had a huge impact).

~~~
vphantom
I don't think he's a co-founder but he is the one who brought OCaml into that
company. Started out as a means to do some quick demos and ended up being
their language of choice.

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dunefox
Ocaml the language isn't the problem for me, it looks great. The real problem
is everything else: the libraries, the build tools, the package manager, etc.
I tried to set it all up and after a couple evenings gave up. Also, when I
realised that it doesn't support unicode strings I tried to find and install a
library and I just couldn't work out how.

~~~
GeorgeWBasic
If you were inclined to try again, I'd start here:
[https://dev.realworldocaml.org/install.html](https://dev.realworldocaml.org/install.html)
for installing the basic compiler and tools: essentially, use your OS package
manager to install opam, and then use opam to install everything else. Then
work through the rest of the book.

As far as unicode goes, strings in OCaml are just bytes, so it won't mangle
any unicode without you telling it to. If you need to process text that uses
code points above the ASCII ones, there is camomile, which can be installed
easily with opam and has documentation here:
[http://camomile.sourceforge.net/dochtml/CamomileLibrary.html](http://camomile.sourceforge.net/dochtml/CamomileLibrary.html)
. I haven't used it but it looks straightforward enough.

Note that sometimes people in forums will complain about an OCaml library not
being updated in years. In the OCaml universe, this is normal. Many libraries
don't get much churn and continue to work unmodified for years. As long as
they've been modified since the switch to immutable strings, and as long as
they don't depend on libraries that do churn (Base does a bit, as it's still
in development, but they'll stop soon I think) they'll probably work. I use
several such.

~~~
dunefox
No, I don't think so, I moved on to other languages. I want to think about
problems, not about tools.

