We need a document or book about OCaml engineering best practices.
Topics that would be good to cover:
Toolchain setup
Editor and support tooling for the editor, e.g. Merlin and build
error reporting
Project management including multiple projects with dependencies
among each other
Compatibility
How to maintain source compatiblity (e.g. with SemVer and what OCaml
practices are necessary for SemVer or a best effort approximation of
it)
How to achieve binary compatibility or how to at least deploy
binaries to end users
How to cross-compile
Overview of essential application libraries. These are the things you
need if you want to convince a business that OCaml is a viable
application programming language
Concurrency with Lwt
How to write a web server
How to write a webapp frontend with BuckleScript/Reason
How to write a GUI with Lablgtk
How to connect to and interact with popular databases
More online resources is always great (I certainly wouldn’t mind having more books), but there’s already awesome-ocam.
I think that what the community needs is way more blog writers. People that know “some OCaml” and are vocal and opinionated enough to spread their knowledge. Ideally, you would be able to look up “Concurrency with Lwt” on google and find more than auto-generated docs and forum questions.
Thanks for the pointer Gerson. Awesome-ocaml is indeed a very nice list, but it’s not a guide. That is, it’s not really designed to give you an idea of what’s considered to be engineering best practices in OCaml, and an overview of how to accomplish certain common tasks. It’s more focused on what libraries and tools exist in the ecosystem. Two different viewpoints.
As for bloggers, that would indeed be very nice, but it wouldn’t really alleviate the confusion of newcomers trying to figure out how to do something. A central source of documentation would.
That is a very interesting list of topics, @yawaramin!
If I remember correctly Learn OCaml is saying this on top:
Your Help is Needed
Many of the tutorials below need updating and tutorials on many new topics are needed. Please contribute by visiting this project’s repo on GitHub; you may use the issue tracker there to request or offer new tutorials. Thanks!
So perhaps we could direct some of these there instead of creating a new portal?
Both of these approaches can use community contributions, but we might need to measure which are friendlier, creating PRs for ocaml.org tutorials or creating and editing a wiki page.
I totally agree, guides and tutorials should be centralised as much as possible. I should clarify that I want to avoid creating new OCaml portals–if at all possible
Blog articles tend to be more analytical on the topic they focus and at times they can offer usefully alternative narratives. They should be a nice addition to some base documentation on OCaml.org.
I think this would be definitely useful. I am creating the internal version of this for our engineers. I would be interesteded working with you on this one too.
Totally, I have some preliminary stuff for Reason (because most of our devs are frontend) and some experience building OCaml apps for backends. I would be more than happy to work with you on this guide.
