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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

You can compile to native and use the whole OCaml ecosystem over there (in stead of the NPM ecosystem when doing client-side or Node-based-server-side) to write your apps.

For instance this fast OCaml http server: https://github.com/inhabitedtype/httpaf

And you can even share types between client and server :)

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What's the point of using a different syntax if you are going to be interacting,reading,fixing code in ocaml syntax?

ReasonML is just a different syntax that compiles to the OCaml AST format. If you're writing in ReasonML you'll be interacting, reading and fixing code in ReasonML.

There's even a browser extension which converts OCaml syntax to ReasonML and vice versa in docs.

I was going to ask; I read some discussions on r/reasonml and seems some people prefer the ocaml symtax and some the reason syntax, but both can compile on both on both sides as far as I understood.

Lower barrier to entry. Facebook is not pushing its own next JavaScript.

They lost the Flow-TypeScript battle. And they learned, they wanted even more typesafety I guess.

Since TypeScript also compiles to JS, bringing "something a little less like JS, but a lot more safe" to the table seemed a better idea that pushing "unfamiliar syntax, but heay, it compiles to JS"

Flow and ReasonML are started by completely different people/teams inside the company. From what I heard, Facebook the organization does not care that much about OSS, and software devs have to work really hard to convince to spend company time to maintain an OSS software.

If there is any battle, I predict will probably be between Flow and Reason inside the Facebook org because of competing solutions.

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