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

[Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com>]

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