Hello Everyone!
I’m rather new in OCaml, my last language I used a lot in my day to day activities professional and not was Golang.
In Golang the slice of bytes is essential, I get the feeling that in OCaml they want us to stay away from Bytes, it seems to me as a rather newcomer that there’s very little functions or apparent ways of working with or handling bytes in OCaml.
Is this a wrong feeling I’ve gotten and if so how do you guys usually handle (IO) input and output?
Thanks!
In Go the common way to do it is using io.Reader and io.Writer. They expose the low-level read/write functionality in terms of byte slices. In OCaml I would say the common way to do I/O is buffered I/O using channels. See specifically these modules in the standard library:
There are also lots of I/O operations available from the Stdlib module (the one that’s always in scope): OCaml library : Stdlib
The common way to work with these I/O operations is reading/writing strings, but you can also use the available functions that deal with bytes directly. A typical example is:
val input : in_channel -> bytes -> int -> int -> int
Thinking about it a bit more, you might benefit from reading or skimming through some chapters of the OCaml Unix programming book, which deals with I/O and related topics: Unix system programming in OCaml