HN Reader

Over the past few years, OCaml has seen an abundance of new language features and standard library additions. OCaml 4.08 added let-binding operators (syntactic sugar for continuation-passing style and monadic programming), OCaml 5 implemented a multicore runtime and effect handlers, OCaml 5.3 finally added dynamic arrays to the standard library, and OCaml 5.4 added labeled tuples.

With unboxed types, I believe OCaml would achieve similar granularity over memory allocations as C#: garbage-collected, but supporting "structs" which are allocated on the stack (or inline the same heap allocation when part of a reference type). I think there is an unexplored space for "soft" systems programming languages that retain a garbage collector by default, while also allowing the programmer to tightly control memory allocations in performance-critical code.

If OCaml hits this sweet spot in abstraction, what domains would adopt it? Could OCaml potentially compete with C#, or Swift?

it's a massive crime that decades into FP, we still don't have a type system that can infer or constrain the amount of copies and allocations a piece of code has. software would be massively better if it did - unnecessary copies and space leaks are some of the most performance-regressing bugs out there and there simply isn't a natural way of unearthing those.

> In the steady state, a webserver would have almost no garbage collector activity

I recently wrote my own zero allocation HTTP server and while the above statement is possible to achieve, at some point you need to make a decision on how you handle pipelined requests that aren't resolved synchronously. Depending on your appetite for memory consumption per connection, this often leads to allocations in the general case, though custom memory pools can alleviate some of the burden.

I didn't see anything in the article about that case specifically, which would of been interesting to hear given it's one of the challenges I've faced.

Does it look like functional programming anymore ?

From the article:

> I am also deeply sick and tired of maintaining large Python scripts recently, and crave the modularity and type safety of OCaml.

I can totally relate. Switching from Python to a purely functional language can feel like a rebirth.