

The OWebl Cookbook - eatonphil
http://www.meetowebl.com/cookbook

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SwellJoe
I've often wondered why OCaml isn't more popular. There was a time when it
utterly _dominated_ the various benchmark games, both in brevity of code and
in performance.

Of course, I never used it for anything, so I should probably ask myself why I
never used it, knowing how concise it is and how fast it seems to be...

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evincarofautumn
It suffers from a lack of tooling and libraries, mainly. If more people used
it, it would create a demand for these gaps to be filled. Anecdotally, the
runtime also falls down when you need to use large arrays or strings, or do
lots of floating-point calculations.

Even though it doesn’t have all the features of OCaml, I think F# is an
eminently practical substitute, considering that the CLR and Mono are both
quite solid, battle-tested runtimes, and using F# gives you access to a large
body of C# libraries.

Then again, there are a lot of things to like about OCaml. The compiler is
fast, the error messages are good, there are some advanced type system
features to improve the correctness and performance of your code, and (as with
F#) you can freely mix imperative and functional features as you see fit.

~~~
lpw25
> Anecdotally, the runtime also falls down when you need to use large arrays
> or strings, or do lots of floating-point calculations.

Anecdotally from one specific well-known troll. (I'm not saying it is or isn't
true, just that almost all of these claims originate from a single individual
with an axe to grind).

~~~
evincarofautumn
I was referring to my own (limited) experience and stuff I’ve read from Jane
Street. If people have axes, let them grind them.

