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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Try an ML-family language (e.g. OCaml, F#, or Rust) if you haven't already. You get the best of all worlds: expressiveness, safety and speed.

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I like the expressiveness of Rust in theory, but for the programs I write I don't feel like I get sufficient payoff for fighting the borrow checker, as compared to writing in Go. Would I be correct in saying OCaml is pretty much Rust without the borrow checker? I have no prior experience with the language.

> Would I be correct in saying OCaml is pretty much Rust without the borrow checker?

Yeah, it's very much on those lines, though the syntax is a bit more ML-style (Rust pushes a bit towards a C-like syntax).

(I actually mostly use Scala myself these days, but I know the JVM is a dealbreaker for some people, and the design compromises for the sake of Java compatibility mean Scala is probably not the best choice for a first ML)

If you want something closer to Rust, consider looking into Reason. It’s essentially OCaml with braces and semicolons.

Dlang is also very nice if you like Algol style languages. You can get productive in it pretty fast, just like in Go, but it's expressive, it's garbage collected by default and you don't waste time fighting the compiler. Also the code compiles as fast as Go with DMD and LDC. I havent tried GDC.

https://tour.dlang.org/

Plus you get templates and CTFE, which are both awesome. Though if you're doing web stuff I've found D compile times to not be so great anymore, especially when diet templates get into the mix.

Rust was originally described to me as "OCaml + C", so there's some truth to that. The language has strayed a bit farther from OCaml in many ways.

I really like OCaml, and you should learn it, but you should also know that concurrency is not a strength of it. It's being worked on...

Single-process concurrency is great in OCaml. It’s flexible and composable with libraries like Lwt and Async. On the other hand true multicore backend is where the most work is moment. For the latest update on that see: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-multicore-report-on-a-june...

(Tl;dr: It will be officially merged in 2019.)

Yes, I should have said parallelism, my bad.

I hope that it does get merged soon, people have been waiting quite a while, in my understanding. It’s a tough problem.

Why can't he just be happy using Go?

If he(?) wouldn't use it for daily scripting then it isn't meeting all his needs. IME being able to use a single language for both scripting and "real" code is an underrated advantage, since it lets you reuse all your helper functions etc. in your scripts.

What you are describing (one language to rule them all) is a non-goal to 98% of HN readers.

Only because they assume it's impossible.

Or, because like most professionals, we understand certain tools are better than others at specific tasks, even when there's specific tools that do both things equally well. There can be an option that's preferred even when it's "only" good at one of the things you need.

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