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Comment by conroy | Hacker News Reader

This landing page includes a pet peeve: zero-context social proof.

It's great to know that Microsoft, Docker, and Facebook use OCaml. Buy do they use it seriously? The industrial users (https://ocaml.org/industrial-users) page links directly the company websites. Only two logos from the home page have case studies. Don't just tell me that Microsoft uses OCaml, tell me how!

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I know that Facebook's Typescript competitor, Flow, was both written in OCaml and tried to introduce the HM type system into the JS world. It was quite popular back in the day, but eventually lost the war to TS.

Perhaps more notably, they are still actively working on Rescript (formerly ReasonML), which is an Ocaml dialect with JS as the primary compilation target (think Clojurescript but Ocaml). They also maintain a flavor of React specific for Rescript. I don't know how much they dogfood it, but it seems like they're at least somewhat betting on an ML future.

Disclaimer: Not a FB/Meta employee

their python type checker, pyre, is also written in ocaml

Docker Desktop uses OCaml/MirageOS for handling all network translation between host and guest systems: https://www.docker.com/blog/how-docker-desktop-networking-wo...

I don't even put much faith in those. I've seen enough that I was sure they were BS... they're just noise to me.

Same way Microsoft uses Java, mainly. They copied it, paid a bunch of geniuses massive amounts of money to make it better and run on their platform, then spent millions and millions of dollars recruiting Ocaml (Java) developers into their proprietary F# (C#) universe.

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