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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice website and certainly an improvement from the older one. I just hope that this isn't the only area where OCaml improves. I'd love a consistent documentation source a la docs.rs, better support for language servers, and maybe an explicit effort to build out a good package ecosystem.

I really want to like OCaml but the usability story is so far behind Rust. The language is stunning but the ecosystem needs a lot of work.

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The docs.rs part is actually included in the new website: https://ocaml.org/packages

I've been using ocaml-lsp-server with nvim-lspconfig and it's been great, I'm wondering what issues you've had? From my perspective the ecosystem is evolving pretty quickly!

I can second your experience of using ocaml-lsp-server - I use it with VSCode and it's been incredibly pleasant with lots of active and ongoing work to make it even better. Gone are the days when writing OCaml basically meant using emacs (thought that's still a good option if you want it!)

Perhaps the README[1] is out of date, but it appears to note that textDocument/implementation is not done? That's a pretty big hole.

[1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp/#features

OCaml has a pretty decent language server [1]. You can pair it with the excellent OCaml vscode plugin [2], or any other LSP plugin for the editor of your choice.

[1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp/

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ocamllab...

The VSCode plugin and language server are really good. They're not quite on par with rust-analyzer, but I very rarely have issues with them, especially when using esy as the package manager (because you can easily set the version of the language server and be sure that everyone on the team is on the same version).

I don't think the ocaml tooling is great but I don't find it too much of an outlier compared to other languages I work with. I haven't used rust but I do believe it's better there. Ocaml has been improving steadily over the last few years though, and none of those things has been a major barrier to anything I needed to do recently.

For the language check out Reason. It looks even better! It’s almost like Ocaml but for made JS, React and stuff. You can use Ocaml modules with it by the way. Since it’s all based on Ocaml

https://reasonml.github.io/

After some confusing decisions, ReasonML ended up splitting in two. The JS side got rebranded as Rescript: https://rescript-lang.org/

Oh I didn’t know. Thank you very much! I’m going to check that.

I used Reason for a few projects. It was a nice skin over OCaml, although the syntax errors were absolutely horrendous, and the async story was quite mediocre. I don't love it when the solution is "just use callbacks"

Ah ok. Thank you for your feedback.

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