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Comment by hoppelhase | Hacker News Reader

The site states

> Powerful, safe type inference means you rarely have to annotate types, but everything gets checked for you.

Why did they create a new language? Isn't this what they made Flow for? Or does Flow rely heavily on annotations? I did not follow up the development of Facebook's projects recently. This is the first time I have heard of that.

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Ocaml's two decades old. We're doing the very opposite of inventing a new language. I'm on the team and I personally am not capable of creating a language (not to mention recreate an entire ecosystem?) at the same level as OCaml.

Does the Reason team contribute code upstream to OCaml or is the language more of a hard fork starting from OCaml?

We do contribute to upstream, and we've even hired a few renown OCamlers (can't say more atm, sorry). As a matter of fact I've kept a list of Reason's contributions, PRs or otherwise. I'll publish it in due time.

Reason is basically a syntax transformation from a JavaScript-like syntax to the classic OCaml syntax. Thus, they can sit on top of any existing OCaml compiler (e.g. ocamlc, ocamlopt, BuckleScript) without having to fork anything. The Reason team is working hard right now to build up a community around ReasonReact. On top of their upstream contributions, they are generating massive publicity and goodwill towards OCaml the language itself.

Cool. I didn't realize Reason was so loosely coupled from the underlying OCaml compiler.

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