RE: [Caml-list] Re: Haskell vs OCaml

["Jon Harrop" <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

Chet Murthy wrote:
> No OSS language runtime can afford that.
> ...
> This is hard, expensive, and will never happen for a language runtime
maintained by an open-source community.

That amount of effort might not be expected for such a language but I would
not neglect some opportunities that OCaml does have to improve this. For
example, LLVM and Clang could be used to help autogenerate bindings to C
libraries. That would be a big step up from where OCaml is today and would
yield dividends across the board.

> So .... why should you use ocaml instead of a CLR-based language (like
F#)?
> Well, as Daniel Bunzli said, maybe you shouldn't.

Exactly. Yaron's assertions that OCaml is highly productive, efficient and
reliably are not universally applicable. Which raises the question of when
they are applicable?

The OCaml distribution itself is certainly very reliable but is also very
limited in capability so I see no merit in restricting consideration to just
that. Indeed, LablGL was always reliable provided the code was compiled on
the machine it was run on and not distributed as a binary.

> But I would note that your experience would be no different if you were
> using Python, Perl, Ruby, or PHP.

I'm not convinced. I think part of the problem may have been linking between
statically-compiled OCaml code and libraries like OpenGL. With Python, the
OpenGL bindings would have been compiled for a specific binary distro which
might affect reliability.

Cheers,
Jon.