Having developed Haskell professionally for many years, I've spent the last two years programming OCaml professionally. I've been really enjoying the OCaml tooling: dune, Merlin and ocamlformat work extremely well for me. Dune especially is packed full of features, for example a file-watch mode for tests. Merlin doesn't choke on large codebases like some of the Haskell tooling did and ocamlformat works better than any code formatter I have ever used. The tooling is so good, I can forgive the rather minimal standard library. OCaml is also very good regarding backwards compatibility, new releases don't break our builds.
I have to agree so much. Been following for years, and started new experiments this week. It all worked so well.
dune init …
opam install some tools like lsp
restart vscode
dune build --watch and I’m good to go.
Edit: adding some counterpoints and issues to level the field (but are being worked on)
1. dune/opam - wish they were one thing. I can still install packages with dune, and a package lock file exists for deterministic-enough builds.
2. dune files and s-expressions are still weird to write. I wish we can move away, or at best, have a tool that helps you remember and where configs. best I have now is chatgpt instead of having to crawl dune docs
3. eio, lwt, async - 3 async runtimes, hoping that one day it’ll be easy to use an async lib with an lwt-based project via eio. The division will likely never be consolidated
1. I agree. And this is being worked on, in the future dune will take on more package management tasks.
2. Agree, YAML has decisively won the config format wars. But dune it's extremely unlikely that dune will change this, and we can at least tell ourselves that s-exprs are pretty cool after all.
3. Yup, I hope Eio becomes the de facto standard in the future.
