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

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>]

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A few thoughts:

As Anil said, we're working on an updated RWO, which should resolve the
camlp4 issue.

As for mixing and matching between libraries that do and don't depend on
Core, there's actually little difficulty here. Core sticks to the standard
interchange types (array, string, option, list, char, and now result) that
are provided by the stdlib, so whether you use Core (or Core_kernel)
becomes more a matter of personal preference, and shouldn't hinder
interoperability.

One remaining problem with Core is the minimal executable size, which is
currently much bigger if you use Core. We're considering some work in three
next few months to make this much better.

Async and Lwt are a real problem. They provide very similar functionality,
and mixing and matching between two schedulers is not so easy. I'd love to
see some resolution here, but it's not clear what the solution would be.
Perhaps once we resolve the executable size issues of Core, there will be
more appetite for some kind of merger of the two libraries.  In the
meantime, we're highly committed to continuing development and support for
Async.

y
On Jun 30, 2016 6:32 AM, "Dean Thompson" <deansherthompson@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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