back

by eatonphil·11y ago·view on hn ↗
I think Rossberg's (author of 1ML) comparison[0] might be more appropriate because it doesn't make assumptions about what is better or worse in a language - whereas Chlipala's comparison makes a lot of assumptions. I personally don't think a lot of the assumptions he makes are valid especially when languages that are still "popular" and in-use today (C, Go) have features that he would seem to call "academic" rather than professional.

My point being, it's not that simple. Though I will grant that the libraries and existence(!) of an OCaml community is good reason to select OCaml over SML.

[0] https://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html

1 comments
That is a more thorough comparison. Makes deciding the victor a bit more difficult at language level except to say that there's more similarities than differences. As you said, libraries and community are main deciding point for me if I have to recommend a ML.

However, I do like that ML has a certifying compiler (FLINT). Love to see one for Ocaml for use in critical tools. The Esterel SCADE code generator, done in Ocaml, was manually verified to object code. That and FLINT make me hope it can be done with reasonable effort with Ocaml.