Re:Functional Programming in OCaml
by thinkpad20 on Sunday March 03, 2019 @03:03AM
(#19293332)
Hah, no I don't have a blog, but I'm glad you enjoyed reading it! :)
I touched on this a bit, but the main thing is the compiler experience. I've written apps in Haskell compiled to JS before; specifically I was using Miso. While I very much enjoy writing Haskell -- that part was great -- the compiler is very slow, the binary is huge, and the generated code is completely incomprehensible. There are a few other disadvantages, such as runtime bulk, speed, laziness and the multitude of string types as well. Bucklescript is _so_ much faster than ghcjs and the tooling fits neatly into an established workflow (i.e. webpack, create-react-app etc). It compiles almost as fast as ES6, it has a built in code formatter, it supports JSX natively, etc.
That, plus I had been curious about trying OCaml for a while and I figured why not.
I touched on this a bit, but the main thing is the compiler experience. I've written apps in Haskell compiled to JS before; specifically I was using Miso. While I very much enjoy writing Haskell -- that part was great -- the compiler is very slow, the binary is huge, and the generated code is completely incomprehensible. There are a few other disadvantages, such as runtime bulk, speed, laziness and the multitude of string types as well. Bucklescript is _so_ much faster than ghcjs and the tooling fits neatly into an established workflow (i.e. webpack, create-react-app etc). It compiles almost as fast as ES6, it has a built in code formatter, it supports JSX natively, etc.
That, plus I had been curious about trying OCaml for a while and I figured why not.