Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml

Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by mos87 on Monday November 17, 2025 @01:03AM (#45951187)

The only program written in OCaml that I think I've used is WeiDU mod installer for Infinity Engine games. Took a quick look under the bonnet too. Suffice to say, my only thought has been that should the author had chosen a sane language like say Perl (which seems to be ideally suited to what WeiDu does), the software could have been improved by many, many people.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by _flux on Monday November 17, 2025 @02:30AM (#45951552)

Unison could be one of the more popular programs written in OCaml.

This sort of lead into trouble at one time, as the author chose to use the OCaml serialization of data as the protocol, so synchronization between 32- and 64-bit platforms or even binaries compiled with different versions of OCaml was not possible. Eventually this was fixed, though, with custom serialization.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by antonvs on Monday November 17, 2025 @01:48AM (#45951347)

That would have required the author to write Perl. Some sacrifices are not worth making.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by mos87 on Monday November 17, 2025 @02:38AM (#45951588)

well then the functionality has been sacrificed - because few people besides the author were willing to brave hacking in OCaml I presume

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by StopDisinfo910 on Monday November 17, 2025 @09:52AM (#45954092)

Just to be sure, are you complaining about the work done by the solo developer of a patching tool for a collection of old games distributed for free and thanklessly maintained for years because you dislike the language they chose for their own work which I repeat they are providing for free?

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by mos87 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @04:05AM (#45962954)

Be sure, I'm not complaining about anything here.

Tho initially all those years back IIRC I wanted to tinker with how it installs mods for the Linux native "enhanced" editions. Otherwise I wouldn't even know what it's written in.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by antonvs on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @01:22AM (#45961960)

The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so it’s a weird choice of example.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by mos87 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @09:53AM (#45966960)

If falling out of fashion is that good reason then yeah. At least it's not a highbrow esoteric language thingy that next to no-one in the wild used to begin with.

I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by antonvs on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @11:40PM (#45975925)

Perl didn't just fall out of fashion. It failed as a language because it wasn't able to keep up with what other languages could do in practice. The people behind Perl recognized that, but weren't able to agree on a solution. So usage of the language collapsed.

A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by mhd on Monday November 17, 2025 @05:34AM (#45952396)

Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan)

Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by mos87 on Monday November 17, 2025 @05:54AM (#45952492)

No, I haven't meant to imply that Perl should be used for the subj. But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml. All depends on the programmer unsurprisingly.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by ernst_klim on Monday November 17, 2025 @06:09AM (#45952577)

> But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml

Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.

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Re:Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml by jasaldivara on Monday November 17, 2025 @11:42AM (#45955291)

I don understand: If there are so many developers willing to contribute with non OCaml languages, why they don't just implement their own mod installer in Perl, Java, PHP or whatever a "sane" language is?

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