Re: general question, was Re: OCaml is broken

[Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net>]

On 21-12-2009, Keyan <ml@pulsschlag.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i have a large project written in C++, for which i am planing to write
> add-ons and tools in ocaml, e.g. different tools to analyse my code
> (dependency stuff), an interpreter for a script-language i plan to
> include, etc, etc. form my time at the uni i remembered that ocaml
> allows to compile libraries which can be included in c/c++ program,
> and i know people who use it extensively in other projects. therefore,
> i decided to give ocaml a try. i like functional programming, and my
> first steps with ocaml are very promising.
>
> following this discussion, i am not so sure anymore, if ocaml is a
> good decision. may be i got this discussion wrong, but if ocaml is
> dying out, i might have to look for another functional programming
> language to use with my project.
>

OCaml is not dying out at all (v3.11.2 is being prepared, v3.12.0 is
coming soon). 

Of course, the core OCaml distribution (the one shipped by INRIA), is
missing some features. You can use libraries/alternative compiler to
have these features back (cothreads, jocaml, camlp3l). 

The only point of the whole discussion -- which is a recurring point by
some of those who participate -- is the lack of shared-memory
parallelism in the core language. Other languages like C or C++ are also
lacking this support in their core definition... I.e. there is way to
do it but you need to use pthread or Win32 thread.

All in all, you can go a long way writing your tools with OCaml without
encounting these problems. For the topic you describe, OCaml is a good
choice.

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall