Re: [Caml-list] how to encourage adoption of OCaml?

[Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>]

From my understanding so far, it seems to me that mixing and matching Core and not-Core would be tough? Everything from result types to Lwt vs Async? Given the inspirational and educational power of Real World OCaml, many newcomers will face this issue.

Dean


> On Jun 30, 2016, at 6:17 AM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 30 June 2016 at 11:01, Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is hard for me to judge because I came through RWO, but it appears to me that the lack of consensus on standard library comes up pretty quickly.
> 
> I think the standard library situation is much less of a concern than
> it once was, now that it's easy to distribute small OCaml packages and
> manage dependencies.
> 
> In the past distribution difficulties discouraged dependencies: for
> example, even though many people prefer the design of ocaml-re and
> ocaml-pcre to the regular expression facilities in the standard
> library, the administrative overhead of an additional dependency made
> the standard library the easier choice overall.  In that situation
> it's desirable for the standard library to be large and featureful.
> Nowadays there's much less benefit to having regular expression
> support in the standard library, since depending on ocaml-re or
> ocaml-pcre is just a matter of adding a line to an opam file and a few
> lines to the build configuration.
> 
> The standard library still has a useful role to play, since it's
> easier to make libraries interoperate if they can communicate via
> common types, and several recent and proposed changes have that kind
> of role in mind.  For example, the latest release of OCaml added a
> 'result' type to the standard library, which was previously defined in
> incompatible but essentially equivalent ways in several libraries:
> 
>   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/147
> 
> and there's a proposal for adding iterators to various container types
> for the next release currently under discussion:
> 
>   https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/635