Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyoverby | Hacker News Reader

I tried using Reason for a side project. Getting the build tools and the package manager for ocaml took too long so I gave up.

View on HN

If you're still willing to give it a second chance, we've got https://github.com/chenglou/reason-react-example which uses only npm Sorry for the crappy initial experience.

I did see that, but I discounted it because I wanted to make a serverside (native, not serverside-js) application, and I assumed that the reason-react-example was only for making compile-to-javascript applications.

If you'd like, I can help you get set up on Discord: http://discord.gg/reasonml

Just so we don't miss the opportunity to learn - would you mind stating what you would find valuable in a toolchain for building a server side native system? What kind of things about project management/install appeal to you?

When will ReasonML use the latest OCaml? Maybe it doesn't matter much, but it's still quite an old version.

We are compatible with 4.03 and 4.04 via opam!

That's great to hear. It's often a bad sign when base-something can't be upgraded and lags for years.

I think you need to update this page since it mentions 4.02.3 still. https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/README.md#ins...

Thanks for the reminder.

The most important part of language tooling for me is reproducability. I should be able to do the following to any project:

    git clone <project name> && cd <project name>
    <build tool> build

And have it fetch all of that projects dependencies, and then build the entire system.

Anything that requires machine-wide package installation is immediately disqualified (user-wide package installation is almost as bad).

I had much the same experience. I'd be interested to try it for general purpose programming, but the setup procedure is so tied into doing web work that I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

What's Reason's debugger story like?

Red (https://github.com/reasonml/red) provides a useable frontend to the ocaml debugger. If your code compiles with bucklescript (most code will), the debug experience using node and the chrome inspector is surprisingly good even without source maps. The compiled ocaml maps to remarkably straight forward javascript for most code. I used both while developing Immutable-re.

May I ask what you end up using?

Ended up just writing it in Rust which I've been using for years now. I wanted to try something new, it's hard to compete with Cargo for package management + build tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com