Jane Street releases open source alternative to OCaml's stdlib | Hacker News Reader

Jane Street releases open source alternative to OCaml's stdlib

ocaml.janestreet.com

90 points_bbs12 comments

Open articleView on HN

Just a note, this is an announcement that they've but their corelib on bitbucket, the library itself has been available from janestreet for years.

While this is mostly true, it's worth noting that this is part of a push to make Core easier to build and use, which we hope will encourage more people to use it. (And enable others to contribute.) There's still a ton of work to be done in that regard, but this release, at least, includes a Linux build script, and the libraries which are necessary for building Core.

Also, this release includes Async (our concurrency library), which is a much more recent release (October 2011). If you'd like more information about Async, there's Ron's blog post announcing the release [1], and also a previous comment of mine with some very basic sample Async code [2].

[1] https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/100

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3278532

What was the initial motivation for writing an alternative "standard" library? Is it self-sufficient or does it build new frameworks onto of OCaml's standard library?

I'm really not the right person to be answering this. I haven't been at Jane Street that long, and I have no experience programming OCaml without Core. You'll likely get a much better answer on the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ocaml-core. (I've also posted a link there to this discussion already, so hopefully someone will come by and give you a better answer.)

Probably the biggest difference between Core and the INRIA (default) standard library is that Core itself is mostly written in OCaml. This has many benefits: code is less verbose, easier to read, it's easier to verify correctness, etc.

The std-lib in OCaml's official release by INRIA is very basic and not enough to be used in medium/large projects, and some people would rather call it "base-lib" instead of "std-lib" . Two major libraries can be used as an alternative, i) Jane Street's Core libraries. and ii) the comunity-driven "Batteries included".

Related links:

Core: https://bitbucket.org/yminsky/ocaml-core/wiki/Home Batteries: https://github.com/ocaml-batteries-team/batteries-included

For someone just starting out with OCaml, what are the pros and cons of one over the other? (or which would you recommend and why?)

I've been interested in OCaml for a good few years now and have tinkered with it from time to time, but I think its time I gave it serious try.

First, I think for beginners the std-lib is fairly enough for basic learning tasks. Choosing a library is something one should consider only after he has gained some insight of the language.

Second, As no better than someone "just starting out with OCaml" myself, I'd like to redirect you to this page on StackOverflow for a comparison between Batteries and Core:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3889117/what-are-the-pros....

Great, thanks for the link!

Choosing a library is something one should consider only after he has gained some insight of the language.

Well, like I said, I've tinkered with OCaml in the past and have a reasonable idea what it has to offer. While I still have a lot to learn before I can properly make use of OCaml idioms and such, I would prefer if I didn't have to relearn the library as soon as I get to a level where I can write real programs. From the link I see that Batteries is backwards compatible with the standard library, so perhaps its the better one to start with for a beginner.

I wish someone capable authored a Haskell standard library replacement. It could have many improvements:

* Marking partial functions with some naming convention

* Polymorphic containers, with polymorphic "length" and other features people take for granted

* Removing monomorphic functions such as "map" and "empty" -- expose APIs almost always as part of generic classes

* type String = Text (Along with extra polymorphism it should not cause any trouble)

* Sane numeric hierarchy that matches the mathematical definition

* Fix the Monad/Applicative duplication mess (Also remove "fail" from Monad)

I'd like this too - but I imagine part of the reason why this hasn't been done is that the recommended libraries are still in flux. Text is a very recent library, for instance.

Personally, I'd think Hackage getting some kind of support for popularity metrics would go some way to solving this problem, by helping create a consensus of what packages used the most by the Haskell community.

@njs There's a start on hackage 2, but it hasn't hit 0.1 yet

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/o5iov/modern_reallw...

@peaker I think each of your issues has prior art. The author of yesod has had his gotcha/critical-list, and a response from a Simon!

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/k4lc4/yesod_the_lim...

and partial functions in prelude

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/lf71l/deprecate_pre...

re: the Functor/App'tive/Monad hierarchy

http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/Proposal-Move-the-insta...

re: redoing Num and numeric tower (prolly won't happen)

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nt0op/i_wrote_a_mod...

also: quality/popularity of packages, as more and more hit git/github, they could post #s of forks, pulls etc, as a crude proxy for ... something

Reply on news.ycombinator.com