This is also somewhat backed up by the fact that OCaml (to my understanding) is basically GC Rust without a borrow checker, and yet it’s basically a hobby language.
If you look at it from that perspective, then Rust is the hobby language.
How different?
Rust has functional programming features and no garbage collection, because the borrow checker can tell when a closure will outlive the references in its captured environment. We used to think that would not be feasible other than perhaps in very special cases - hence the need for GC to keep that environment around - but Rust proved that wrong quite convincingly.
Also, OCaml had trouble with multithreading for quite some time, which was a limiting factor for many applications.
Facebook made a large effort to thrust OCaml into the limelight, and even wrote a nice alternative frontend (Reason). Sadly, it did not stick.
Old but funny comparison: http://adam.chlipala.net/mlcomp/
> 1/100th the momentum and community and resources of Go or Rust
I think even 1/100 would be pretty generous.
* Rust has a C++-flavored syntax, but OCaml has a relatively alien ML-flavored syntax.
* Rust has the backing of Mozilla, but I don't think OCaml had comparable industry backing. (Jane Street, maybe?)
I do not at all agree with this. Rust is by far the most complex language in terms of syntax that has ever become popular enough to compare it to anything.
Can you show example of "written by random cat" code you often see?
But you use it more and see actionscript types of function notation, funtional language semantics where you just "return" whatever was the last expression in a statement, how structs have no bodies (and classes aren't a thing) and instead everything is implemented externally, and it starts to really become its own beast.
> Rust's syntax is similar to that of C and C++,[43][44] although many of its features were influenced by functional programming languages such as OCaml.[45] Hoare has described Rust as targeted at frustrated C++ developers...[15]
I'm not sure what "actionscript types of function notation" means, but Rust's closures syntax (|x| ...) was probably inspired by Ruby and/or Smalltalk. Anyway, sure, the expression-orientedness, implicit return, etc., are very un-C++-like, but I do think the syntax was explicitly designed to be approachable to C++ developers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rust_(programming...
Hell, the early versions of the Rust compiler were written in OCaml...
Your list is at least missing PHP, Typescript, Swift, Go, Lua, Ruby and Rust though.
But Ocaml really doesn't belong anywhere close to this list.
OCaml runs software that billions use, is used by financial and defense firms, plus Facebook.
But Lua? By that metric I'm throwing in every language I've ever seen a job for...
R, Haskell, Odin, Lisp, etc...
Edit - this site is basically a meme at this point. Roblox is industrial strength but Facebook, Dassault and trading firms are "hobby". Lol.
Also, I'm not dissing Lua, there's just irony in calling Lua industrial but not OCaml...
Do realize that luajit for years was bankrolled by corporations.
Lua, Bash ... these are birds of a feather. They are the glue holding things together all over the place. No one thinks about them but if they disappeared over night a LOT of stuff would fall apart.
The most famous example being World of Warcraft, but it's far from the only one. If you play, or have played, games, you almost certainly have run software built with Lua without realizing it.
It's not because a language isn't relevant in your personal coding niche that it's not industrially relevant.
OCaml's use is comparatively very, very narrow.
And, in case you are wondering, I have absolutely nothing again OCaml. In fact, my first ever programming language was, as a significant fraction of French engineer from my generation, the “Lite” dialect of Caml. And I suspect that its OCaml heritage is a significant fraction of the reason why I love Rust.
But being used by exactly one FANG company, a single finance one and allegedly a defense company (aren't you confusing Dassault System with Dassault Aviation ?) isn't enough to change its status, especially when it's not the dominant language in two of those (AFAIK Jane Street really is the only one where OCaml has such a central place).
Dassault Aviation makes the planes themselves. All Dassault companies are under one umbrella anyway.
The OCaml website lists a bunch of other users.
In my opinion, none of that really matters, any single one of those uses proves it's utility... Facebook Messenger alone is probably used by more people than every piece of Lua software ever made though.
First, Dassault Systèmes doesn't fall "under one umbrella" with Dassault aviation, it is an independent public company (with the Dassault group having minority shares in the company). And just because a software company has defense related products doesn't make it a “defense company”, nobody would ever call either IBM or Microsoft “Defense Companies”.
Then Facebook doesn't seem to be using Ocaml in Facebook Messenger, and instead uses its standard tech stack for that (the Hack PHP derivative).
The fact that Facebook has a developer-facing team building internal development tools with OCaml doesn't suffice to change the status of a language: since there are barely any Ocaml developers at Facebook, an Ocaml enthusiast would have to be very, very lucky to land an Ocaml job there…
And that's the whole point of the “hobby language” status: can you land a job using it or not, and Ocaml simply isn't that kind of language. And again, France has been teaching Ocaml to at least a hundred thousands of students over the years.
I kind of like that Ruby is still focusing on single developer/small team productivity.
Also I would argue the rust compiler started as a hobby project
> Yes, the first prototype of React was written in SML; we then moved onto OCaml.
> Jordan transcribed the prototype into JS for adoption; the SML version of React, however great it might be, would have died in obscurity. The Reason project's biggest goal is to show that OCaml is actually a viable, incremental and familiar-looking choice. We've been promoting this a lot but I guess one blog post and testimonial helps way more.
A version of React was built to run in ReasonML, which is a flavor of Ocaml for the web, but Reason didn't even exist before React was fairly well established.
Hell, Facebook's own XHP's interface (plus PHP/Hack's execution model) is more conceptually relatable to React, and its initial development predates Jordan's time at Facebook. It wasn't JavaScript, but at the very least it defined rails for writing applications that used the DOM.
It's not about not having a C-like syntax (huge mainstream points lost), good momentum, and not having the early marketing clout that came from Rust being Mozilla's "hot new language".
The difference between academia languages such as ocaml or haskell and industry languages such as Java or C# is hundreds of millions of dollar in advertising. It's not limited to the academy: plenty of languages from other horizons failed, that weren't backed by companies with a vested interest in you using their language.
You should probably not infer too much from a language's success or failure.
No, I'm not talking about financial backing in general, I'm talking specifically about advertising the language.
There's no doubt that a big ecosystem helps a lot, Python is a good proof of that ; but this is not what i was talking about.
Java and C# are the only one's that fit this. Go and Rust had some publicity from being associated with Google and Mozilla, but they both caught on without "millions of dollars in advertising" too. Endorsement by big companies like MS came much later for Rust, and Google only started devoting some PR to Go after several years of it already catching momentum.
Yes.
> in advertising
No, in hiring 500 compiler and tool developers, developing and supporting libraries, optimizing it for niche use cases.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2003/06/09/sun_preps_500m_java_b...
No amount of advertising is going to propel Haskell to a mainstream language. If it wants to succeed (and let's be honest, it probably doesn't), it's going to need an investment of millions of developer-hours in libraries and tooling. No matter how pretty and elegant the language may be, if you have to reinvent the wheel every time you go beyond "hello world" you're going to think twice before considering it for production code.
Rust is a significant counterexample