Item — HN Reader

So, I get that there is momentum behind rust but I'm still a little surprised they're hitching themselves to that as opposed to F#.

I'm obviously missing the big picture, but it just feels like if you want ocaml but can't use it¹ then f# may well be a closer fit. That said I'm sure it would be nice to get rust language training from the team at ocamlpro!

¹ For reasons you can't use ocaml I'm thinking about the long road to multicore, and access to a more substantial ecosystem.

3 comments

I don't mean this in any snarky way, but after reading that part of the post, it's hard to understand why anyone would consider using OCaml. I mean, even the guys trying to advance OCaml have given up and moved to Rust. That might not be what they meant, of course, but it's not hard to come to that conclusion.

Why wouldn't you? The size of the community is definitely a significant advantage of Rust of OCaml, but if you want to use either then you need to be comfortable with reasonably niche things. Other than that, what is there? I don't believe multicore is relevant for the vast majority of projects (for instance those where JavaScript or Python could be plausibly used).

On the flip side, OCaml has a GC and Rust does not. For any other language and most usecases, that would be a dealbreaker. It's very cool how Rust has made it less so, but I'm not convinced it is magic enough to make it insignificant.

> That might not be what they meant, of course, but it's not hard to come to that conclusion.

The overlap between Ocaml and Rust is approximately similar to the one between Python and C (except Ocaml actually has relatively good performance). I have trouble envisionning a situation where having to choose between one and the other would make sense.

Since when is a complement a replacement?

The main reason not to use OCaml but Rust is imho "no runtime needed" (aka better-C). This is why they considered Rust complementary to OCaml (which would not be true with F#, the multicore issue will be addressed soonish).

Rust is not mentioned as a replacement but as a complement to OCaml in the article.

I don't believe I said it was. Let me try again.

My point was that in the places where you may choose to use something else, but are firmly in the ocaml camp, then F# feels like it would be a more natural choice.

I doubt many people who are in Ocaml camp see F# as more natural choice. Multicore is a nice to have thing, but it isn't a dealbreaker, see python, nodejs. Depending on your domain, ocaml ecosystem can be way more mature.