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Comment by yawaramin | Hacker News Reader

There must be a misunderstanding here, maybe on my side, but I honestly can't see how BuckleScript is 'falling behind': it jumped from 4.02.3 to 4.06 fairly recently, with more upgrades planned, and there is ongoing work to make it emit JS that looks more and more hand-written. Its download count looks like hockey-stick growth: https://www.npmtrends.com/bs-platform

Look, JSOO is great but it has a very different goal from BuckleScript: letting OCamlers use the Opam ecosystem to make frontend apps without caring about bundle size. And that's great, but it's not what JavaScript developers want.

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I think you know what I mean. 4.02.3 was released in 2015. 4.06 was released in 2017.

Like I said, I know the tradeoffs between JSOO and Reason. And lack of features from the past 2~3 years of OCaml development is one of them.

Yes, if your only heuristic of 'falling behind' is 'not getting the latest OCaml features'. It turns out that even OCaml from a few years ago is perfectly usable to build an excellent JavaScript-focused compiler.

I think "getting OCaml features at a slower rate than OCaml itself does" counts as "falling behind", yes.

2015 OCaml was an excellent language. 2020 OCaml is exquisite.

What feature of 2020 OCaml do you think would convince JS developers to use Reason?

Monadic let syntax would be a big win (allows for async/await-like constructs) in Bucklescript, and inline variant records have been nice once or twice (I see reason newcomers at dojos do this naturally almost every time shortly after introducing variants).

Inline records are available since BS 6 :-)

@dmit, we will have to agree to disagree there; the reality is, only a very few people are using the absolute latest OCaml features. If you look at the Opam package build matrix: http://check.ocamllabs.io/ ... most Opam packages are building against 4.02 to 4.05. And OCaml in 2020 is great but it's still not close to what we need for wider adoption in its chosen native compilation space. BuckleScript/Reason is a different strategy, which actually does seem to be working for that goal.

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