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Comment by woolvalley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>But what a disappointment if this is still the case

Well, it's not yet ready, but it's incoming

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

> 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.

I agree that sum types are indispensable in a modern programming language.

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.]

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...

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...

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

Nullability? Why?

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