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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

OCaml is often dropped due to its unpredictable performance

Interesting. I’ve actually seen OCaml being chosen because of its predictable performance. But that was by people coming from Haskell.

Well, almost everything has more predicable performance than Haskell. And I love Haskell.

Huh? OCaml is pretty obvious in its semantics and compilation strategy. Maybe flambda changed something, but before that I'd used the compiler source code as a reference on how one would compile an ML.

I've heard the opposite about it, that its predictable performance is one of its strength. Do you have any sources?

Darklang is being rewritten in .Net

Flowtype has horrible performance, which in my opinion partially explains why it has lost so many users to Typescript, which has much more predicable and fast performance even though it's written in JS. The project is basically dead

None of this seems related to OCaml performance?

Darklang is being rewritten to .Net because they were unsatisfied with the OCaml ecosystem.

Horrible performance is generally more a question of algorithms and software architecture than a problem with a language, which only account for a flat percentage of performance.

Here is the article about Darklang leaving OCaml, nothing here is about performance https://blog.darklang.com/leaving-ocaml/. It's about ecosystem and dev experience.

About Flow, I've never used it so I can't say, but Rescript (which is written in OCaml) compiles 10 to 100 times faster than Typescript.

I've never used neither Flow nor TypeScript, but there's an essential difference between the two - Flow is type inference engine, whereas TypeScript is a type checking engine. The latter is a fundamentally a much simpler problem (both semantically, and algorithmically) than the former. In addition, Flow picks a particularly nasty niche for type inference - OCaml itself uses type inference, it's fast (with quadratic blowup in edge cases) because OCaml's types are simple, whereas Flow IIRC tries to support both subtyping and some of JS's dynamicity, so I'm not surprised if it's slower.

I don't think I've ever heard that. Ocaml performance is surprisingly very predictable.

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