OCaml Briefly

After seeing that Facebook's Flow tool was written with an OCaml parser, I was quite impressed by the beauty of its syntax. It makes functional programming feel much less intimidating, compared to Haskell or a Lisp in my opinion, and I can see the parallels to F#. Thanks for sharing this introduction, it was very apropos for me!

Having a quick look at ocaml again, I find I&#x27;m hoping someone will take the time to write a &quot;How I start&quot;-article[1] for it, detailing things like installing (something like wget raw.githug...opam_installer.sh &amp;&amp; .&#x2F;opam_installer.sh bin - that gets you the latest opam locally), setting up janestreet core and utop, and finally bootstrapping some kind of not-entirely-trivial hello-world app and&#x2F;or library for use with &quot;opam install ...&quot;.<p>I did for instance find a couple of interesting (to me) libraries: <a href="https://github.com/esperco/ocaml-imap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;esperco&#x2F;ocaml-imap</a> and <a href="https://github.com/nojb/ocaml-maildir" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nojb&#x2F;ocaml-maildir</a> . But only the first can i &quot;opam install&quot; -- as a newcomer to ocaml (or returnee of sorts) -- I my intuition tells me that being able to set up a chroot&#x2F;image with just stuff via opam would <i>probably</i> be what I want.<p>But that&#x27;s exactly why it&#x27;d be nice if someone that actually does this (and uses ocaml in anger) wrote up a proper &quot;How I start&quot;-article.<p>[1] <a href="https://howistart.org/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;howistart.org&#x2F;</a>

How does Ocaml do on having predictable memory usage? This is still a weak spot in Haskell, though I absolutely love the language and it hasn&#x27;t mattered yet for my use cases.<p>Doesn&#x27;t it hurt having a GIL?<p>How awesome is having the ML module system?

This was written by an issuu engineer. Does anyone know if issuu uses OCaml?

I have been interested in OCaml for a while, and this is a nice piece. One question, though - some of the examples start like this:<p>- :<p>Is that the prompt from the OCaml REPL (does OCaml have a REPL)?<p>EDIT: I think I misread things - it&#x27;s the output from the examples that has the &quot;- :&quot; prefix, so I&#x27;m guessing it is REPL output.

Is there a tutorial out there showing off the OCaml tooling from a working coder perspective? I mean setting up a project, managing dependencies, debugging, testing, etc. I really think that average joe programmers like me could benefit from features offered by strongly typed FPL, but lack of good tooling is a show stopper. Elixir does an amazing job at this, but it&#x27;s not as safe and general purpose as OCaml or Haskell.

I&#x27;m very surprised articles about OCaml (and more generally functional programming) are popular on Hacker News. FP isn&#x27;t exactly a new thing. I would assume most CS graduates have experience with functional programming (I learned &quot;Caml Light&quot; as an undergraduate in 1996).