Idea: OCaml should provide a “upstream integrated and mandated runtime type representation” In the thread My Thoughts on OCaml vs Haskell/Rust in 2023 - #12 by dbuenzli @dbuenzli wrote I said it more than once but I think this is a red herring. The pain point is a lack of upstream integrated and …

There is also a thread with a discussion of how to encode dynamic types from scratch Types as first class citizens in OCaml It has been extremely useful for me as I’m trying to design a dataframe library for OCaml to make it more usable for data science and ML use cases.

[image] sid: There are at least 4 (!) libraries people wrote for our small ecosystem! I wrote another one (and decided recently to rewrite it). I have opinions about what I think would be a useful addition for type witnesses in the forthcoming Type module in OCaml 5.1, but I’m not ready to de…

Has anyone done a comparative analysis of these libraries?

I will likely do that shortly as I want this for Dream.

Maybe it’s also worth checking dynamic types in SML# 13 SML# feature: dynamic types and typed manipulation of JSON ‣ Part II Tutorials ‣ SML# Document Version 4.0.0 - SML# Project

Thanks! I will comment here from the perspective of a general-purpose runtime type representation. We need a runtime representation that allows inspecting and traversing the runtime structure and writing transformers on top of that. I agree with sentiments expressed here that that would alleviate th…

[image] yawaramin: I then tried out Dyn (thanks @anmonteiro for the pointer) instead as it is simple and likely to be already installed in a lot of switches. Note that this is not a runtime type representation. It’s a uniform representation for values that you inject your values into or proj…

Thanks for the clarification. If I’m not mistaken, either representation can be used to create things like roundtripping codecs to various formats?

[image] yawaramin: If I’m not mistaken, either representation can be used to create things like roundtripping codecs to various formats? Sure but the runtime costs are likely to be different, with Dyn you need to convert to/from an intermediate universal representation before doing anything. …

Idea: Standard OCaml runtime type representation

Ecosystem

antron May 2, 2023, 8:51pm 9

Library comparison results here.

Topic		Replies	Views
Run-time types: uses and wants Ecosystem types , stdlib	44	1708	August 28, 2026
The future of ppx Community ppx	19	15300	April 17, 2020
Ocaml stdlib and death by a thousand papercuts Ecosystem	89	6682	January 2, 2025
Overview of libraries for showing OCaml values Ecosystem	8	1604	May 15, 2023
Pretty printer for custom data types best practices? Learning	54	7637	December 31, 2020

Idea: Standard OCaml runtime type representation

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