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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

If they're serious about their criteria they should go with OCaml (or maybe, like, Swift, or any of dozens of languages in that space).

(Of course they actually do want Haskell but they probably need to get there gradually)

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Does ocaml have a mature ecosystem of libraries and dependencies? And easy way to manage them? Even rust with all its hype lacks in this area imo.

No, and that's part of why I use Scala instead. But this person is looking to make a binary to do a small thing on their desktop and does not list dependency management among their criteria.

Depends on what you're doing and how you structure your program. It certainly does not match the ecosystem of Go, Rust or C++

It doesn't have a great ecosystem of libraries, but it _does_ have a good way to manage them: https://dune.build/, which as I understand it was developed at Jane Street (lots of code and dependencies) and is now open source.

> Even rust with all its hype lacks in this area imo.

This is surprising to me! I find that Rust has pretty excellent tooling, and Cargo is substantially better than the package manager in most other languages...

I didn't write that clearly. I meant the ecosystem still isn't mature. Agree with you rust tooling is major positive for the language

right! the table at the end just screamed "use ocaml and be happy"

nobody gives OCaml a thought in these discussions. It’s such a wonderful language!

It doesn't use curly-braces driven syntax, so will probably be accused of being "complex" and dismissed.

Doesn't Rust steal a lot from Ocaml?

Kinda sorta yeah. The original implantation was in OCaml, too.

Yes, but not garbage collection. Given that OP's main concern with Rust is not wanting to manually manage memory, they should really just use Ocaml.

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