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Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried OCaml? With the latest versions, it also has an insanely powerful concurrency model. As far as I understand (I haven't looked at the benchmarks myself), it's also performance-competitive with Go.

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How's the build tooling these days? Last I tried, it used some jbuild/dune + makefiles thing that was really painful to get up and running. Also there were multiple standard libraries and (IIRC) async runtimes that wouldn't play nicely together. The syntax and custom operators was also a thing that I could not stop stubbing my toes on--while I previously thought syntax was a relatively unimportant concern, my experience with OCaml changed my mind. :)

Also, at least at the time, the community was really hostile, but that was true of C++, Ada, and Java communities as well well. But I think those guys have chilled out, so maybe OCaml has too?

I'm re-discovering OCaml these days after an OCaml burnout quite a few years ago, courtesy of my then employer, so I'm afraid I can't answer these questions reliably :/

So far, I like what I've seen.

Ocaml community is chill and helpful, and dune works great with really good compilation speeds.

Its a really nice language

    $ dune init project my-project
    $ dune build

That's it, now you have a compiling project and can start hacking.

Yea, there's not much for large scale production ocaml though, do it would be a tough sell at my work. It's one of those things where like.... if I got an offer to work at jane street I might take it solely for the purpose of ocaml lol.

There's also OCaml at GitLab and Semgrep, if you're on the market :)

Fair lol

Though as a side note I see no open gitlab positions mentioning ocaml. Lot of golang and ruby. Whereas jane street kinda always has open ocaml positions advertised. They even hire PL people for ocaml

I agree that if you’re learning a language primarily to find a job, OCaml isn’t currently the strongest choice, aside from the positions that companies like Tarides offer. However, if your goal is to learn a language that will genuinely improve your programming skills, I’d say OCaml is one of the best options.

There's also ReasonML if you want an OCaml with curly braces like C. But both are notably missing the high-performance concurrent GC that ships with Golang out of the box.

As far as I understand, OCaml's recent multicore GC is pretty good.

I haven't looked at benchmarks, though, so take this with a pinch of salt.

I thought ocaml programs were a little confusing about how they are structured. Also the use of Let wasn't intuitive. go and rust are both still pretty much c style

I think you’d need only a few hours to get used to the let style. Other syntaxes may feel more intuitive simply because we’ve seen more C-style code, but there’s nothing intrinsically “superior” about them. For me, the match syntax, the function signatures, the |> operator, and OCaml’s approach to shadowing are all very readable... often easier to grasp than the equivalent constructs in many other languages.

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