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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

I am currently doing some interventions in some Ocaml code written by Big Co. The world is completely different between you writing your program in your corner, and stumbling in a codebase with a serious history and a task to do on it efficiently.

It's not going quickly nor easily, and there is no real help from Jetbrains IDE.

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it should at least offer things like "show-type-of-expression-at-current-cursor-position"

It doesn't, it colors some keywords, it tries to follow symbols, but doesn't know the difference between 'let rec' and 'let', so it's tricky.

Maybe JetBrain doesn't, but lot's of editor do, thanks to merlin, including vscode.

Thanks, I'll download it, but it's really disruptive to switch IDE. (I do a lot of langages at the same time hence the jetbrains suscription)

edit: it's a nightmare of dependency hell to install merlin, I'm giving up for now.

What package manager? `opam install merlin` should just work.

OCaml has a relatively immature ecosystem, but merlin is a great tool.

It doesn't just work for me, no detailed error message I'm 3 or 4 levels down (vscode->plugin->homebrew->opam->jbuilder-> doesn't work).

https://gist.github.com/nraynaud/deeacbb67c88646fd6754edba6e...

Sorry, I'm a bit abrasive, but I spend a lot of time with crappy tooling of all kind, sometimes I'm envious of monoproject people (and then I remember that actually I don't do well in monotony).

I think `opam` failed to find `jbuilder` on the `$PATH`, even though (presumably) `opam` has built it and installed it in it's own `bin/` directory. Try running `eval $(opam config env)` to update the `$PATH` and trying the commands again.

It looks like out output some logfiles. Anything in them? Apologies, at any rate, for being wrong about it just working.

It does. Install caml-mode or tuared-mode in emacs. Add -annot to ocamlc compilation flags, and type C-c C-t et voilà.

Why are you not using emacs? Or why did you accept the job if you don't want to use emacs?

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