Major OCaml pain points

[Yaron_Minsky]

@andreypopp

Not a major pain point here (as there’s a working solution) but I’d like to see first class support for “deriving framework” from compiler toolchain (w/o ppx).

I worry that this is in effect a request for a less modular compiler ecosystem, and as a result a request for a slower development process, for both extensions (like deriving) and for the compiler proper.

The current PPX architecture could use strengthening, but I don’t see why we’d be better off by stuffing more things into the compiler proper that can effectively be built outside of it.

I think the deriving construct is pretty well understood and useful to be available out of the box. Now I don’t like that I have to use ppx (and then ppxlib, base, stdio, … long chain of dependencies) just to derive some comparator or sexp encoder/decoder. Even more than that — I have to impose those dependencies on the consumers of my software.

Why is this an onerous list of dependencies? ppx_fields_conv, for example, requires base and ppxlib…and that’s it? (well, there’s the runtime library, fieldslib, but that’s to be expected. And there are no further dependencies of that.) And Base is portable and builds quickly.

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