@jhw yes, dune trades away flexibility for stability and concision. It’s been around for many years now and we still support very old projects while dramatically improving things under the hood.
We’ve also taken a few lessons from OMake. In particular, OMake’s server mode was incredibly innovative and our watch mode intends to replicate, and hopefully improve on the experience. One thing I dislike about OMake is the language. On one hand, it’s flexible enough for some simple projects, but on the other, anything semi complex goes way out of hand and becomes impossible to maintain. As a programming language, OCaml is much superior to OMake’s and much better suited for writing build rules.
Dune’s language is intentionally primitive and doesn’t pretend to be a serious programming language. Eventually, we’ll make dune extensible directly in OCaml.
@timmy_jose I’m on IRC and discord and I agree that IRC can be a bit dead ever since discord knee capped it. Personally I don’t notice more “useless responses” on IRC than discord. I find that the two communities heavily overlap and the quality of responses is about the same.