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Comment by mands | Hacker News Reader

Looks like really cool tech - at a first glance reminds me of the UI.Next reactive rendering model in WebSharper/F# (http://www.websharper.com/docs/ui.next) which also has an OCaml/ML heritage.

Have been thinking about using OCaml again for a new project - does anyone know the state of libraries for common web tasks, like AWS, these days?

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I've been using OCaml to build a language and runtime system for cloud orchestration[0]. As part of that, I've developed an AWS library whose code is generated from the service descriptions published by boto. It will be open-sourced at some point in the future, along with a few other things that should make developing web stacks using OCaml much easier.

If you're looking to try out OCaml, I'd say the time to do so is quickly approaching.

[0]: http://www.inhabitedtype.com/

Great to hear, sounds like an fascinating project and look forward to trying out the AWS library. Funnily enough the project I considered using OCaml for was to build a language & runtime for container orchestration.

Yes, OCaml dev seems to be picking up again - I used to use OCaml/JoCaml a few years ago but moved to Haskell and F# in the meantime. However am very excited by the work on Flamba, multi-core and hopefully modular implicits, as OCaml always felt most natural.

I've been learning OCaml lately and I can't help but wonder (aside from the fact that it's an ML lang) why OCaml didn't capture the infrastructure tooling space and Go did. OCaml is so much fun to write, easy to reason about and has pretty good TLS/SSH libraries. Here's to hoping OCaml grows more!

Nobody ever accused OCaml of having good marketing and sexy websites (at least before ocaml.org). And for a long time, tooling was second fiddle (for instance, the existence of a package manager is a somewhat recent addition, and the least said about the standard library, the better).

Jane Street Core has to all intents and purposes solved the standard library problem. I admit I had my doubts in the past which one of Batteries or Core would be the "winner" so avoided them both and stuck with the default standard lib, but I think anyone starting a project today should start it on Core.

This may get better with the latest OCaml, but Core-powered binaries are ginormous. And AFAIK, Core doesn't work with js_of_ocaml (and I'm not sure if it works on Windows at all).

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