Comment by emmanueloga_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emmanueloga_ | Hacker News Reader

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If I get it right (from posts I've seen before and the docs on the project [1]) Reason is not really "OCaml for JavaScript" but just a parser for a more appealing, mostly compatible, syntax for the OCaml. So one should be able to compile to the same targets as with traditional OCaml.

Re: Mostly compatible: I remember there were certain things that were not easily expressible with Reason (but available in the OCaml syntax) a few years ago, not sure if it is still the case.

Subjective: OCaml syntax is definitely on the weird side, although I would not call it ugly. This coming from someone who enjoys writing clojure and xslt, go figure :-p.

1: https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/src/README.md...

Js_of_ocaml [1] is a good alternative to BuckleScript for standard OCaml (non-Reason).

For example, it works well with Core_kernel [2] and Async_kernel [3] to provide high-level functionality that is cross compatible between Unix applications and browser applications.

[1] https://github.com/ocsigen/js_of_ocaml

[2] https://github.com/janestreet/core_kernel

[3] https://github.com/janestreet/async_kernel

Js_of_ocaml works fine with Reason, though.

To be clear, Bucklescript also works with standard OCaml (because Reason is just an alternative surface syntax).

BuckleScript (https://bucklescript.github.io/) is used for using OCaml to output JavaScript. Reason can target native just like vanilla OCaml syntax can.

Oh, I was browsing BuckleScript's history and for a minute thought evmar [1] was involved (author of the ninja build system) [2].

But I think evmar's commits are just ninja commits. First BS commit: [3]. Almost looks as if the author of BuckleScript maybe forked the ninja repo and started to work in BuckleScript from there.

Why would anybody do that? Such a mystery...

1: https://github.com/BuckleScript/bucklescript/graphs/contribu...

2: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja

3: https://github.com/BuckleScript/bucklescript/commit/a626ee8b...

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