RE: [Caml-list] geany as an ocaml ide

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

I tried to do something similar once but the experience of trying to write
even the simplest GUI app using OCaml was horrific using Emacs and I gave
up. In contrast, I often develop GUI apps using F# and it is very easy. The
main difference is having an IDE (Visual Studio) with Intellisense so you
can explore APIs interactively from the editor without having to go back and
forth between Emacs and OCamlBrowser (a nice tool but completely
unintegrated).

So this is a chicken and egg problem: writing GUI apps is much harder in
OCaml than it could be with a GUI app to help you write GUI apps in OCaml.

I do think this is the right problem to be attacking though. OCaml could be
a fantastic language for GUI development thanks to polymorphic variants and
so on. The marriage of a metalanguage with good GUI support is incredibly
powerful.

Cheers,
Jon.

-----Original Message-----
From: caml-list-request@inria.fr [mailto:caml-list-request@inria.fr] On
Behalf Of Louis Gesbert
Sent: 11 February 2013 11:41
To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] geany as an ocaml ide

OCaml is definitely lacking in this area; I am at the moment working
precisely on solving this issue, with a dedicated Gtk editor that runs on
Linux, OSX and Windows. It is pretty basic at the moment but already has
code edition and working toplevel interaction (no compilation or project
yet).

Release is intended in a few months from now, with sufficient features for
beginners and students. If successful, it will then be extended to handle
bigger projects (multi-file, build system integration, etc.).

Until then, you may see the project's github page at
https://github.com/OCamlPro/ocp-edit-simple (name temporary)

--
Louis Gesbert, OCamlPro

Le Monday 11 February 2013 01:49:41, Martin DeMello a écrit :
> I spent some time last night going through all the "what is a good
> (beginner's) ide for ocaml?" threads I could find online, and trying 
> out the various options suggested. I ruled out the following:
> 
> * vim, emacs and eclipse (not beginner-friendly; people who want to 
> use them will know how to do it)
> * anything that did not provide a binary install for Windows and OSX, 
> and wasn't a simple configure/make/make install on linux
> * anything that needed fiddling with config files just to install it
> * anything that needed the OCaml sources to be independently present 
> and configured (!)
> * anything that was abandoned, or didn't seem to support OCaml 4
> 
> I was left with Geany and Komodo Edit as possibilities, and Geany won 
> out by letting me open up a test.ml file and immediately being able to 
> find and run the OCaml compiler. At least on Linux, it was a perfect 
> beginner-friendly experience.
> 
> So what do people think about ocaml.org officially promoting Geany as 
> the answer to "I'm learning OCaml; what is a good IDE?"? I'd be happy 
> to write up a page on it and contribute it.
> 
> martin

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