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

[Chet Murthy <murthy.chet@gmail.com>]

> > Why do "buggy drivers" affect 80% of our users when we write our software
> > in 100% OCaml and 0% of our customers when we write our software in 100%
> > F#?

[short answer: because each time that a paying customer is affected by
a buggy driver, the vendor of the CLR or JVM spends -serious- money
finding and shooting that bug.  They spend -serious- money building
internal tooling to help them do this.  It's expensive and
time-consuming, and furthermore consumes -extremely-skilled- people.
No OSS language runtime can afford that.]

Maybe I can help here.  I've spent a lot of my life with ocaml, and
even more with the JVM and Java (feh).  The JVM's not so different
from the CLR in the sense that it gets used with a -ton- of C drivers.
Especially in the early days, lots and lots of C drivers.

Here's the thing, though: Java "comes with" a decent number of C
libraries for things like graphics and such.  And -vendors- write
database drivers (like the old ORCL OCI JDBC drivers).  When those
drivers segfault (or trample on JVM memory), believe it, it's a
nightmare for JVM maintainers and support people.  Of course, the
vendors themsleves work -very- hard to find and remove bugs in these
drivers, but some always remain.

To the point where, one common diagnosis step is to try to eliminate
that C driver and get repro.

It is common that JVM developers will also develop in-house support
tools that can analyze core-dumps at a -ridiculously- detailed level,
in order to figure out what got trampled, and try to work out why.

This is hard, expensive, and will never happen for a language runtime
maintained by an open-source community.

So .... why should you use ocaml instead of a CLR-based language (like
F#)?  Well, as Daniel Bunzli said, maybe you shouldn't.  But I would
note that your experience would be no different if you were using
Python, Perl, Ruby, or PHP.  All those language-runtimes lack support
of the sort you get from the JVM or CLR.  And there are reasons why
people prefer these languages/runtimes over the commercial ones.

--chet--