Do I have this wrong? Why doesn’t Ocaml just merge Base (with permission) and put their best foot forward for the ecosystem?
Meanwhile, the built-in Stdlib finally started to acquire much needed functions and modules during the late 4.x releases. My biggest worry is whether they'll keep up the pace, it doesn't even have a resizable array or, alternatively, a Clojure-like vector (but neither does Base).
May I also ask, have you worked with Ocaml for any medium to large projects?
I’d be curious to hear from major users that are NOT using Base, and hear how they’re getting on. The 5.0 release especially has catalyzed my interest in Ocaml, and I’ve a few years left in me still before retirement, I’d like to pick up one last niche ‘fore I quit.
The same thing is true with the build system dune and opam. Half-assed build system and package managers that we’re kind of stuck with.
I dream of a new cargo-like build+package manager system for OCaml that would just take over everything we currently have.
the Jane Street side are quite prolific with blog posts etc
as a newcomer to OCaml one of the first, and nicer-looking, intro resources you'll likely encounter is the Real World OCaml book https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ which unfortunately does everything using Base instead of the stdlib
Personally that didn't sit right to me and I prefer to use the stdlib by default (which seems fine and not in need of a wholesale replacement)
Thanks in advance.