I recently stumbled across Adam Chlipala’s comparison of OCaml and Standard ML . I’ve often found myself missing some features that Standard ML has, especially first-class constructors. I’m wondering what features (or lack thereof) of OCaml (mainly the language, but also tooling) do people find painf…

[image] Chimrod: Note that I’m in favor of keeping the let rec syntax, but your example is not pertinent. This code does not declare function, but only expressions, there is no ambiguity in A typical use of shadowing is let (* maybe rec *) f x = ... let (* no rec *) f x = assert stuff; f x …

[image] XVilka: For pattern matching: Support for integer ranges · Issue #8504 · ocaml/ocaml · GitHub Thanks for your reply. I’m curious, is there a github request for “more subtyping and polymorphism” also ? As an OCaml user, I feel the need for more subtyping and polymorphism now and then,…

Shadowing is ambiguous in general, for example consider those two perfectly valid definition : let just_one = let x = [] in let x = 1 :: x in x and let many_one = let rec x = [] in let rec x = 1 :: x in x Personally, I am not fond of the idea of pervasive implicit recursion everywher…

People are talking about shadowing here, note that shadowing would still be possible if the function recursion default was switched, you would just have to create a binding with let nonrec ... instead of let .... [EDIT: I mean, presumably let nonrec ... would also be added as valid syntax at that po…

[image] pbiggar: allowing firstclass record field access I doubt this would work well in OCaml. It doesn’t in Haskell. In SML this works great since records are structurally typed, so field is roughly an equivalent to OCaml’s field : < field : 'a; .. > -> 'a

Namespaces. We have a flat namespace for compilation units that requires us to prefix each module with a unique name. Having a Common Lisp style namespaces (aka packages) is what we need in modern Reason/OCaml which is used with package managers such as opam or esy.

let nonrec ... would be markedly more cumbersome than the current let rec ....: there are far fewer recursive functions in an Ocaml corpus than there are nonrecursive ones making let rec the default would mean that either (a) the semantics of repeated definitions (as in the shadowing examples u…

@jonathandoyle see Function argument polymorphism and ocaml #8513 for the discussion and further references.

For your record problem, you can use lenses in OCaml today. The lenses are essentially encoding the position of the field in the records. Indeed, in OCaml, type t = { x: int; y:int} let f r = r.x and type revt = {y:int; x:int} let f r = r.x are very different function. The first translates to ac…

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 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…

Major OCaml pain points

Ecosystem

Chet_Murthy January 16, 2020, 12:22am 33

It is said that no piece of software is ever “done”; there is always another bug, or incompatibility, or feature request.

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Major OCaml pain points

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