OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/
So that does seem to be a good use-case for the language.
I don't build HFTs and my compilers are just for fun. None of my day jobs have ever been a situation where the smaller ecosystem and community of ocaml was offset by anything ocaml did better than the selected options like .net, Java, go, rails, C or anything else I've touched. Heck, I've written more zig for an employer than ocaml, and that was for a toy DSL engine that we never ended up using.
The latter going much further than most mainstream languages.
Yeah, its more just extensions to support their use cases at scale. Think of it more as bleeding edge ocmal, once they work out kinks/concerns they'll get merged back into the language OR if it remains ultra specific it'll stay in oxcaml.
Not a complete own version lol
The main user has been writing extensions to the compiler that they test before pushing for integration like they have done for the past twenty years or so. They publish these versions since last year.
Hardly a failure and certainly not something mandatory to keep things from failing over. Your initial comment is extremely disingenuous.
Python gets forked in other investment banks as well. I wouldn’t say that is evidence of any deficiencies, rather they just want to deal with their own idiosyncrasies.
There might be some power in attracting all the people who happen to love ocaml, if there are enough of competent people to staff your company, but that's more a case of cornering a small niche than picking on technical merits
Regarding attracting talent, they've said they don't care about existing knowledge of OCaml as the language part is something they train staff on anyway. Their interviews are brutal from what I recall. I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics.
Unless their hiring process has changed in the past few years, if you're a dev they're not hiring you for your financial skills, just general problem solving and software development ability. It is (was?) the usual Google-style algorithms/data structures rigamarole, but somewhat more challenging.
Like I said, my information might be a hair out of date, but it's first-hand.
Everybody in the company is expected to be able to sling numbers in text on a computer super efficiently.
Because plenty of people have been shipping great projects in Ocaml since it was released so it doesn’t seem to be much of an issue to many.
I doubt Ocaml will be surpassed soon. They just added an effect system to the multicore rewrite so all things being considered, they seem to be pulling even more ahead.
Beginners face the following problems: there's multiple standard libraries, many documents are barely more than type signatures, and data structures aren't printable by default. Experts also face the problem of a very tiny library ecosystem, and tooling that's often a decade behind more mainstream languages (proper gdb support when?). OCaml added multicore support recently, but now there is the whole Eio/Lwt/Async thing.
I used to be a language nerd long ago. Many a fine hour spent on LtU. But ultimately, the ecosystem's size dwarfs the importance of the language itself. I'm sympathetic, since I'm a Common Lisp man, but I don't kid myself either: Common Lisp isn't (e.g.) Rust. I like hacking with a relic of the past, and that's okay too.
> there's multiple standard libraries
Scala has a far more fragmented ecosystem with Cats, Scalaz, Zio and Akka. C++ and Java have a bunch of stdlib extensions like boost, Guava, Apache Commons etc.
> many documents are barely more than type signatures
Can be said of most of Java, Kotlin, Scala, Erlang etc etc. Just compiled javadocs, sometimes with a couple of unhelpful lines.
> data structures aren't printable by default
Neither they are in C++
I think the real reason it's not popular is that there are languages which solve more or less the same problems of system programming but look far more familiar to an avg. programmer who was raised on C++ and Java.
I wanted to use OCaml since 2002, since it was a GC'd language with good performance, achieving a lot with relatively few lines of code. Being a language nerd, I was (am?) positively inclined to the language. Yet there was always something that made it notably less pleasant to solve my current problem in than in than some other language.
If it had trouble getting traction with me, that's bad news.
Meanwhile the mainstream has progressed a lot since 2000. GC is the standard, closures are normal, pattern matching and destructuring are increasingly so. While HM-style type inference is not mainstream, local type inference is (and I'm no longer convinced that global type inference is the way). Algebraic data types aren't unusual anymore.
A few years back I just threw in the towel and went with Rust; this happened after I volunteered to improve OCaml's gdb support (including DWARF hell), which went nowhere. I wish Rust compiled faster, and a GC'd language is usually more productive for my problems, but in every other regard it stole what should have been OCaml's thunder. And when popular successor languages eventually appear, they'll do it even better.
(Rust has refcounting, but it's slow, and needing to handle cycles manually limits its usefulness.)
https://www.ponylang.io/ https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc
The Pony community is here:
https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/
Pony's garbage collection and runtime can yield performance faster than C/C++/Rust because the compiler eliminates data races at compile time, and thus no locks are needed.
It features implementations of Dmitri Vyukov (www.1024cores.net) algorithms for work stealing and Multi-producer single consumer queues that use only a single atomic instruction to read. The designer, Sylvan Clebsch, is an ex-game-developer and ex-high-frequency-trading-infrastructure engineering lead; he knew what he was doing when he designed the language for high performance on multicore systems.
On the other hand, you do have to re-wire your thinking to think in terms of Actors and their state, and this is kind of hard to wrap one's head around if you are used to Go's CSP or the popular async/await approaches -- it is a somewhat different paradigm.
There is only one standard library and it shipped with the compiler.
> data structures aren't printable by default
So? That’s the case with most languages. Ocaml has a deriver to make types printable and a REPL which automatically prints for testing.
> tooling that's often a decade behind more mainstream languages
Opam is a fully featured package manager, dune works fine, bucks2 supports Ocaml.
> proper gdb support when?
Ocaml has had a rewindable debugger since approximately forever.
> OCaml added multicore support recently, but now there is the whole Eio/Lwt/Async thing.
Lwt was the default and everyone agrees eio is the future now that effects are there. Async is a Janestreet thing with pretty much no impact on the language outside of Janestreet.
Honestly, I maintained my initial point. Ocaml alleged frictions were always widely overstated.
When I was writing Ocaml professionally 15 years ago, there was no dune and no opam and it was already fairly easy to use the language.
For example, there is no OAuth2 client library for OCaml [1]
What applications are written in OCaml? All I can think of (which says more about me than it does about OCaml) is the original Rust compiler.
Even Haskell has Pandoc and Xmonad.
Generally, you want stuff where you have to build a fairly large core from scratch. Most programs out there doesn't really fit that too well nowadays. We tend to glue things more than write from nothing.