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Comment by bambataa | Hacker News Reader

- Ocaml already has a very mature module ecosystem and is now becoming safe and modern.

Do you have any resources on this? I am learning Ocaml and am interested to see what is changing.

Are you aware of OPAM? That's what I am primarily referring to there.

Phew, I thought you were talking about the ecosystem as it refers to docs. The docs for OCaml and the Core library are so absolutely terrible. It's like 1996 threw up in an HTML doc and no one has thought to change any of it. Sadly, ReasonML is taking the same road. Elixir on the other hand has some great documentation. I'd love to see some work done on OCaml's standard library docs so that they had more in the way of examples.

OCaml has odoc now, which is what creates the Core web page. Core does have bad documentation, but you can try Containers, which is much lighter and better documented, but less featureful.

That sounds interesting, thanks!

Check https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

It's a wonderful book. I own a paper copy of the first edition. I know there's a second edition coming. It isn't a substitute for api docs... at all. Take a look at this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/vec/index.html THAT is decent documentation.

opam is bad. One particular pain I've had is that it refuses to be installed as root so it refuses to run in containers unless you make a user in the container.

Wercker only just got the ability to run jobs as a non root user. It's been painful.

> it refuses to be installed as root so it refuses to run in containers

Not sure what you are speaking about. I'm using opam as root in containers everyday. It prints a warning, but apart from that works OK. What version are you using?

Yes, although sorry I wasn't very clear - I was wondering what you had in mind saying 'modern and safe'.

I phrased it awkwardly, what I could've written was

"ocaml has a healthy module system and lots of module authors and maintainers and recent developments suggest ocaml the language continues to move towards more safety and more modern, convenient features."

Linear types are HUGE imo. I'll be playing with ocaml a lot when those comes out. I can't wait to see how far ocaml wants to chase other languages into the memory safety/ correctness rabbit hole. It's great.

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