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

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>]

I'm not at all sure that the decoupling is possible or wise for Async.
My intuition is that this is too complex of a problem with too much
need for careful optimization to be able to have a simple, shared
generic data structure for this.

The solution that seems most plausible to me is to settle on one
implementation, and port the API of one library to run on top of the
other. There was indeed an experiment in this direction that was done
by Jeremie Dimino:

https://github.com/janestreet/lwt-async

That said, until we resolve the binary size issues with Core and
therefore Async, I doubt that this solution would be appealing to the
full community of lwt users.

y

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:13 AM, Ivan Gotovchits <ivg@ieee.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> The solution would be to use the same approach as with standard types. We
> need a common base inductive type for `Lwt.t` (aka `Ivar.t`), which will
> represent a value which is defined in some point in the future (hence a
> `future` is a good name). Another type is for capturing a concept of a
> variable that can have multiple values in the future, that is represented as
> `Lwt_stream.t` or `Pipe`. Currently in both Lwt and Async the main thread
> type is tightly coupled with the underlying implementation, especially in
> Async (Lwt.t can be easily decoupled).
>>
>> 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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>
>