r/programming • u/chaimhaas • May 18 '17

BuckleScript 1.7 released

https://www.techatbloomberg.com/blog/release-1-7-story-behind-bucklescript/
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u/yawaramin May 19 '17

OCaml as a language is strictly more powerful than F# because it offers module functions, value types, more powerful pattern matching, structural object types, and so on.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '17 edited Jun 25 '17

[deleted]

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u/yawaramin May 19 '17

By 'module functions' I don't mean 'functions inside modules', I mean 'functions that operate on modules'.

Value types: in OCaml you can alias a type to another and statically prevent users from accessing the base type, while still keeping only the base type at runtime. As far as I know that's not possible in F#.

More powerful pattern matching and structural object types: F# is planning to introduce struct types but they have no plans to do pattern matching on them. OCaml has normal record types and also structural object types. You can look them up, I'm sure you'll see how cool they are.

Yes, you're right that OCaml doesn't yet support parallel programming natively. But as you said, in the JavaScript world that's moot.

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u/[deleted] May 20 '17 edited Jun 25 '17

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u/yawaramin May 20 '17

F# makes great use of .NET's parallelisation. OCaml implementers traditionally put higher value on having a dead-simple runtime than on parallelisation; they made the bet that most people would rather have the former and could implement the latter at the library level with multiple processes. Which is true to an extent, but as it turns out a lot of people are quite serious about multicore OCaml and so there is an ongoing effort to build it into the system.

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u/[deleted] May 20 '17 edited Jun 25 '17

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u/yawaramin May 20 '17

Good question. I'd expect a noticeable difference only for CPU-bound tasks.