from Hacker News

OCaml 5.0 Alpha Release

by momentoftop on 6/15/22, 10:08 AM with 121 comments

  • by sunflowerdeath on 6/15/22, 11:49 AM

    For almost as long as I've been programming, I find Ocaml a fantastic language, which just lacked some development tools and improved concurrency. I still believe that under the right circumstances it could become a mainstream language.

  • by the_duke on 6/15/22, 11:04 AM

    I heard that 5.0 does not include (user visible) effects (yet?).

    Is this planned for after 5.0? Anywhere I can learn more?

    Getting an effects system with handlers in a (semi)large and mature language is a pretty big step.

    The Koka language [1] has a brilliant implementation of algebraic effects. Sadly it's a research language that doesn't see much development.

    [1] https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html#why-handlers

  • by sigzero on 6/15/22, 12:23 PM

    Whenever an OCaml post comes up the biggest comment about the language was "no concurrency/parallelism". I hope this brings more people into the OCaml world.

    Awesome job to all the devs.

  • by sudarshnachakra on 6/15/22, 3:05 PM

    Hoping this release will bring the below advantages.

    1. A statically compiled language with GC-d runtime, which compiles quicker than golang

    2. Something that brings algebraic effects to the mainstream and with it an arguably better model for concurrency / parallelism

    3. Support value types to take advantage of modern CPU caches

    Finally golang finds some real competition (from a very unlikely source though). Hoping ReasonML will become more popular with this release with true parallelism and nice concurrency.

  • by pdimitar on 6/15/22, 10:59 AM

    Can't wait for tinkering with OCaml when 5.0 is stable. Pretty sure the community will invent amazing libraries for parallel computation as well.

    Maybe finally Rust+tokio projects will have some actual competition!

  • by ufo on 6/15/22, 11:27 AM

    Does anyone know what are the main new features of Ocaml 5.0?

  • by samuell on 6/15/22, 10:54 AM

    Checked in OCaml a few years ago. I remember there being plans for improved concurrency/parallelism, set for the future. Any progress on this in this release?