Replying to @Khady’s comment in the same thread:
We can’t magically find new leaders and founding to make those people work on improving the community. Sure it would be nice, but there is a limited number of OCaml developers, even more limited number of OCaml developers willing to give their free time. And it’s hard to compete with big communities.
We actually have an ace in the hole here. Thinking about it more realistically, ReasonML didn’t take off due to chance – it was adopted by Jordan Walke, who’s already well known in the massive Javascript community for his creation of React.js. This is why Reason has taken off – Javascript programmers pay attention to what Facebook does, and specifically someone like Jordan. The same can be said of Rust – the quick explosion in popularity is largely due to massive support by Mozilla.
Well, Reason is OCaml. This means that hundreds of users are learning OCaml’s semantics. The syntax is different, but the Reason community has already made tools to seamlessly translate between the dialects. And Reasoners would prefer to use OCaml/Reason for the backend of their compiled-to-javascript programs. It’s also likely many people learning Reason will be tempted to try the more functional-style syntax of OCaml. This presents a huge opportunity for OCaml to grow, so long as we are able to leverage this influx and exposure. In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that this is a unique opportunity most small communities don’t have access to.
As just one example, it would be great if a community leader could go on the Reason podcast and talk about OCaml.
As another example, it would be great if more people in the OCaml community used Discord and joined the Reason room. Discord is a more advanced version of IRC containing multiple rooms. Reason has a dedicated OCaml room. This is a great way to meet and talk to people entering the ecosystem, as well as to help them out.
Also, another good move would be to port some successful Reason libraries (of which there aren’t many yet, admittedly) back to OCaml. This usually consists of nothing more than supplying them with jbuild/dune files: Dune automatically handles Reason files. This would motivate Reasoners to try out more of the OCaml ecosystem.