[Caml-list] Question about Lwt/Async

[Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com>]

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Hi all

I'm thinking about my next project in OCaml, and I'm wondering how many
users of OCaml currently use Lwt or Async regularly.

One of the advantages of OCaml over Haskell (which I'm not crazy about) is
the fact that you don't have to constantly be stuck inside a monad.
However, once you want to use these user-level threading libraries, you're
essentially tied to a monad. It also means that the usage of any other
monad from Lwt/Async code is out -- OCaml doesn't have the monad
transformer infrastructure to layer monads easily as far as I can tell (am
I wrong?). I mean, even in Haskell using Monad Transformers is a pain (IMO).

Also, what happens to general utility functions that aren't rewritten for
Async/Lwt -- as far as I can tell, being in non-monadic code, they will
always starve other threads, since they cannot yield to another Async/Lwt
thread. Is this perception correct? If so, this seems to imply that you
either write your code to cooperate within these frameworks and suffer the
monad, or don't, and make it near-impossible for Lwt/Async users to make
use of your code.

I would like to get an idea of the usage level of these libraries, as well
as the burden of writing compatible code, any difficulties etc. Also, I'd
like to get a sense of the domains that benefit from these libraries. Some
domains (such as gaming) traditionally involve a continuous main loop, and
would thus only suffer from the additional overhead of queuing in these
libraries.

-Yotam

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