What is the current state of OCaml-ish in the browser?

[dbuenzli]

I guess so, but over the years we got quite a share of vm technology which in the end no gc’d language compiler backend developer ever seemed to be happy with. And at some point Java Web Start, .net, NaCl or asm.js were all supposed to become much more important :–) So I’m interested but I don’t hold my breath.

[zapashcanon]

@dbuenzli

Also what would be the compilation user experience ? js_of_ocaml solved that problem quite neatly by working out of bytecode. I bet we’ll need special opam switches which also compile libraries to wasm artefacts ?

First, the good thing is that separate compilation is working very well with Wasm.

Having a special opam switch is one possibility and I bet it’s the first one that will be offered. There are others but this question is not really related to what we’re focusing on right now. I’ll be happy to discuss this with you later.

@dbuenzli

I guess so, but over the years we got quite a share of vm technology which in the end no gc’d language compiler backend developer ever seemed to be happy with. And at some point Java Web Start, .net, NaCl or asm.js were all supposed to become much more important :–) So I’m interested but I don’t hold my breath.

Indeed. I’m only aware of Java-likes languages (Kotlin, Dart…) and OCaml that have tried to target the GC proposal. For now, everyone seem to be quite satisfied with it. There are others languages that only targeted Wasm 1.0 like Haskell, we’ll see if the GC proposal match their needs, but I have no reason to think it’ll not work.

[dbuenzli]

Btw. if at some point you get to something with the JavaScript FFI I have a relatively simple number crunching js_of_ocaml app that could offer a few benchmarking scenarios beyond fib. I’d need to ask for some permissions to make it public but I don’t think it should pose a problem, just get in touch if you are interested.