Hacker News Reader

I started using OCaml in 2017, and had a rough start. But since then Dune (https://dune.build/) and the now-excellent LSP implementation have resolved the biggest issues I had. I haven't had such a pleasant development environment since Turbo Pascal! (To be fair, IntelliJ was also pretty good other than the shortcomings of Java.)

View on HN

If you start a project today I would really try to use esy (https://esy.sh/)

I actually don’t use it myself but it seems to bring the modern programming language experience to OCaml

Since you mentioned using IntelliJ, I can't resist asking the question: Have you played with Scala too? If yes, how would you compare OCaml to it?

Ocaml not unbearably slow when say running 10 simple tests. Ocaml is actually amazingly fast and a pleasure to work with.

Sbt is actually worse than dune+opam .

Ocaml has type inference globally so you are not required to spray type annotations at everything.

But Scala does have type directed lookup (type classes/ implicits).

Both have the curse of implementation/typing choices that stops you from doing the actual job ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com