Paul Biggar on Darklang

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You may remember Paul Biggar’s series of blog posts on the process and decision to rewrite his Dark programming language in F#, which was originally written in OCaml:

Paul will be speaking about Dark at next week’s meeting of the Houston Functional Programming Users’ Group. Although he’s not planning to specifically focus on the OCaml → F# rewrite; I’m certainly planning to ask him about the experience, costs and benefits, etc. :wink: If you’re in the Houston area, please join us in person at Improving. Everybody else can join us online, via Zoom. Complete details and connection info are available on our website at https://hfpug.org.

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If recording will be available, please, post it here.

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From OCaml to F#. What a lack of taste. :crazy_face:

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Reasons for doing so would be quite legitimate I imagine—there’s got to be lots of time and effort (and money) spent on the OCaml backend, so changing it to F# has to have been more cost-effective in the long run than continuing with OCaml.
This might be something for the community to learn from. I wouldn’t dismiss this rewrite so easily. I’m interested in the experience reports, on the ecosystem / tooling / deployment / post-release workflows in OCaml vs F#.
I know OCaml and F# aren’t the same—F# is fully backed by MS and benefits from the existent .NET ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from its appeal.

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It doesn’t take anything from your overall point, but the first part of that sentence isn’t that true anymore…
Microsoft, now, expects a lot of community involvement for F# support, they’ll be focusing on leadership and compatibility with C#. (see the recently updated languages strategies for .Net .NET Managed languages strategy - .NET | Microsoft Learn)

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The recording of Paul’s talk is now available on our website at https://hfpug.org. He discusses rewriting the OCaml codebase at about 30 minutes in. His basic argument was that the F# ecosystem was much stronger – libraries, tooling, etc. What was more interesting to me were some of his criticisms of Rust (which is also the subject of one of his blog posts).

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