Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how the $200 million+ Tezos warchest affects the popularity and development of OCaml. That seems to be a fairly large amount in relation to the size of the current OCaml ecosystem, and the whole purpose of the fund is to grow the ecosystem of Tezos which by necessity includes the OCaml ecosystem.

View on HN

I had a look at Tezos -- which I've never seen mentioned before.

If you mean this "Tezos: the self-amending cryptographic ledger" ( https://tezos.com/ ), this look like something done from 4 amateurs in their spare time.

I don't know if it has "$200 million+" warchest, but if it does I pity the fools that gave it that.

If you haven't even heard of it before, then your five second analysis of the home page isn't really worth sharing.

I don't have a lot of faith in Tezos, and it's spent most of the time since its (well-known, but apparently not to you) over-funded ICO spent in legal fights over the money, instead of engineering. However, it's only fair to observe that a lot more thought and work did go into Tezos than most of the other Blockchain crap we see every day. Glancing at the marketing splash is hardly enough to assess that.

>If you haven't even heard of it before, then your five second analysis of the home page isn't really worth sharing.

I'm not so sure. Besides there are lots of way more well known cryptocurrencies that are amateur hour themselves. It comes with the territory.

>well-known, but apparently not to you

Yeah, it's world famous among the people who follow these things...

I think you have the wrong impression. This is one of the more well thought out projects in the space. Don't let the cover (marketing schlock) mislead you.

FB s interest in the ecosystem with Reason might also give a nice boost in development resources for libraries and the compiler.

I hadn't heard of Tezos. Following that up I find https://tezos.com/, "a new platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications", leading to http://doc.tzalpha.net/index.html which is indeed full of Ocaml stuff.

Where does $200 million+ come into it? What is the history there?

They raised that much money in their "ICO"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503768

Thanks. Wish I hadn't asked.

For a smart contract platform, it's probably ok that ocaml isn't multithreading friendly. But what a disappointment if this is still the case: https://ib-krajewski.blogspot.com/2015/11/ocaml-and-multithr...

At this point, if a language doesn't have first class support for multithreading and static typing, I wouldn't start a new project in it. Nullability support is pretty high up there too, but that is a far more tractable problem.

Nullability? Why?

Modern OCaml multithreading is still a couple years away, the current (very promising) approach is still at the design/experimental stage.

Out of curiosity, what is it about smart contracts that makes multithreading so important? Why isn't multiprocessing enough? [edit: sorry, I mis-read your comment. You said that multithreading probably isn't a big deal for this problem.]

It doesn’t necessarily have to be that far out: https://twitter.com/kc_srk/status/994535108127404038?s=20

That would be very nice. I was basing my comments on these meeting notes [1], which seem a bit more conservative. (Multicore should be available experimentally in early 2019, but not ready for production use. I guess the next steps depend on how well those experiments pan out!)

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-multicore-report-on-a-june...

Modern OCaml multithreading is still a couple years away

It's been a couple of years away for the last 10 years.

I know, and I hate sharing "it's coming soon" stories for that reason. But the recent multicore progress-update does seem well conceived, and so personally I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. :)

For the record, the current story is that they are merging some multicore things into 4.08, and it will only be available as an "experimental" feature. So even after it is in the compiler, it will be a couple more revisions before it is fully accepted.

Right, I linked to these summary notes in a different comment:

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-multicore-report-on-a-june...

Not for smart contracts, just as a language in general.

> Nullability support

Nullability? As in null references? The "billion-dollar mistake" (Tony Hoare, referring to Algol), also frequently called the "worst mistake in computer science"?

No as in something like swift optionals:

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/swift/swift_optionals.htm

It's also called nullability support, you can see it in use in this article:

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2011/10/29/a-proposal-for-...

I'm not sure what you mean, optionals are just a sum type (says so in your own article) and Ocaml support for them is first class, also option is a built in Ocaml type http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/doc.preview:batteries-b...

Julia and C# call it Nullable, other Languages Option or Maybe.

Option type on wikipedia, cant paste the link somehow.

Oh, option types! I don't know Julia or C#, so never heard this called nullability before.

On any case, as someone else pointed out, OCaml had supper for option types built in, through sum types.