Never played with OCaml, but I spent the past few days learning about F# (my understanding is that it inherits a lot from OCaml). Tooling seemed great: I used JetBrains Rider; VSCode and Visual Studio are also options. Support seemed great: good official docs; good book choices. Ecosystem seemed great: entire .Net class library.
I’m been on the JVM for 20+ years, but an opportunity came up to leverage some of my other experience to get some CLR work… and I dove in.
F# has diverged from OCaml a bit, but they're still very similar.
I mentioned in a top-level comment that F#'s "lightweight" syntax is basically what I want when I use OCaml. I know ReasonML is a thing, but if I'm writing OCaml I don't want it to look more JavaScripty - I prefer syntax like "match x with" over "switch(x)" for pattern matching, for example.
I know some people dislike the way F#'s newer syntax makes whitespace significant, and that's fair. But the older verbose syntax is there if you need or want to use it. For example, something like
let things =
let a = 1 in
let b = 2 in
let c = 3 in
doSomething a b c
Thank you! I knew this, but of course blanked on it when I came up with an Ocaml example.
There are a few other places I prefer F#'s syntax, but overall it's not the reason I'd pick F# over OCaml for a project. It's usually mostly about needing to integrate with other .NET code or wanting to leverage .NET libraries for specific use cases.
Can't lose either way - they're both a please to work with.
I used to fiddle with F#, its tooling is good, but it's interweaved with too much dotnet c# cruft and also there's the dark shadow of Microsoft. I wish it had zero cost abstractions like Rust because most things you write in F# is also slower than C#
I’m been on the JVM for 20+ years, but an opportunity came up to leverage some of my other experience to get some CLR work… and I dove in.