OCaml’s standard library is poor and has a lot of design flaws. Which alternative do you recommend to use? JaneStreet’s core looks very nice, but as I’ve heard it is too big and not so popular.

You should take a look at Base .

The stdlib is not that bad (except a few modules that really show their age, e.g. Stream or Str). The community provides several options: core (or core_kernel, or base), owned by JaneStreet (Apache) batteries, a community effort (LGPL) containers, my extension (BSD) several other extensions, that …

Indeed. Base in particular is considerably smaller than Core or even Core_kernel, is portable to multiple platforms (indeed, we use both it and Core_kernel when compiling to JavaScript), and builds with almost no dependencies, so it won’t slow you down when installing via opam.

[image] egoholic: OCaml’s standard library is poor and has a lot of design flaws. I’m sorry, but how can you be an OCaml “newbie” and make such a statement ?

@egoholic : I think @c-cube summarised it the best. I have not tried core (and just heard of base). I’ve only tried Batteries and it seems they are not getting enough attention. I’ve been meaning to try containers but so far I have found discrete libraries to provide what I have needed so far and I’m…

It’s very easy: I’m newbie in OCaml, not in software development I’ve read a lot about OCaml and it’s ecosystem and I’ve also read about poor standard library in the RWO book (haven’t you heard about it?) I’ve reimplemented most of RWO examples using OCaml’s standard library instead of Jane…

Thank you for recommendation. I’ve read across JaneStreet’s Base library documentation and it looks as a good replacement.

Thank you for your response, Yaron. Base looks exactly as that what I want to have, except I don’t invest my time in writing it so that I got it for free. Thank you and all of the contributors to Base/Core/Async/Increment/etc. for working on really cool tools and their sharing.

There are alternatives and extensions to the standard library not because it has any flaws or is poorly designed. The main problem with it is that it is very small and lacks lots of features that are common in modern languages, cf., Python, Ruby. This mainly comes from two reasons: First, OCaml is a…

What is the preferable solution for the role of standard library?

Learning

bluddy November 9, 2017, 5:02pm 6

He probably saw other people saying it.

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What is the preferable solution for the role of standard library?

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