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Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

From an outsider perspective it's still make very little sense.

I thought ReasonML is a language, an alternative to Elm, PureScript, or other FRP-focused compile-to-js languages. When I check projects on GitHub written using ReasonML it says "Reason" as a language name (why is it just Reason, and not ReasonML?). For example, Onivim: https://github.com/onivim/oni2

What's BuckleScript then? How is it related to Reason? If it's related why did it have such a seemingly unrelated name in a first place?

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Bucklescript is the ocaml -> JS compiler created within Bloomberg.

Reason is just JS syntax like sugar on top of Ocaml. The creator (of React as well) saw it as a middle ground to bring in the giant JS ecosystem and population which makes some sense.

> What's BuckleScript then? How is it related to Reason? If it's related why did it have such a seemingly unrelated name in a first place?

My understanding, is that confusion is part of why they're rebranding everything to ReScript. The language and compiler are now all ReScript.

I think the reasoning for the difference in naming is likely historical. I'm not sure, but I think BuckleScript came before the Reason syntax was developed. But it's not like BuckleScript has any connection to OCaml, either. So I dunno.

All these questions are exactly why they rebrand under a single name, ReScript.

- ReasonML is a thin syntactical wrapper on top of OCaml

- To compile it down to Javascript you need Bucklescript, an OCaml-toJS compiler developed by Bloomberg (IIRC)

and so on

All the tools need to be installed from different sites, have their own sets of dependencies and conventions etc.

Not really. ReasonML is vendored and distributed with BuckleScript. It's one install to get started:

    npm install --global bs-platform

They are still completely separate entities when it comes to documentation, library support etc.

Work is done to unify them https://reasonml.org/

The reasonml.org project had a very strong focus on documenting the BuckleScript + Reason workflow (later on it was a goal to add Reason Native docs).

Now that BuckleScript was rebranded to ReScript, we decided to move and simplify the BuckleScript related docs from reasonml.org to rescript-lang.org

As soon as we migrated all our existing Reason / BuckleScript users over to the new ReScript website (with Reason syntax toggling etc), we will most likely redirect reasonml.org to reasonml.github.io, which will yet again focus on pure ReasonML / Native docs.

More details will follow as we are making further progress.

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