lefessan

This book is a great.

A common misunderstanding around OCaml is to classify it as a functional programming language, it is actually a multi-paradigm language. In short, in OCaml, you can write in any paradigm you want, imperative, object, or functional.

Typically, I write in a mix of OCaml and stubs in C (for bindings to Linux libraries), for everything, to replace shell scripts, Python scripts, Javascript/Typescript, but also for big applications (I wrote a clone of Emacs in OCaml, a long time ago, before writing MLdonkey).

Once you have started using it, it does not replace your main programming languages, it replaces all the languages you needed...

You can find videos on Youtube, it's like an IDE where you would do everything in a user interface with menus, but the interface is a 25x80-char screen only :-) Everything is "almost" similar to a Unix system, but with different names, files are called "datasets", there are very few tools, but every one of them has a language to do very complex tasks...

COBOL is not dead, but it's difficult to get access to, because there is almost no open-source tooling around it for Linux. We (OCamlPro) have created a project, called SuperBOL, to create an open-source environment around the GnuCOBOL open-source compiler (that is now very mature and used by companies). We have already released the VScode extension with an LSP for COBOL to get a modern IDE, and we are working on other tools, mostly depending on our customers.

Who said COBOL was not trendy ?

A new version of the COBOL ISO standard was released this year (January 2023)

A brand new stable release 3.2 of the free open-source compiler GnuCOBOL was released this summer (July 2023)

OCamlPro is working on SuperBOL, a COBOL LSP (Language Server Protocol) for Vscode, written in OCaml...

We recently worked on a project to build a binary installer for OCaml, inspired from RustUp for Rust. We had to build binary packages of the distribution for every OCaml version since 4.02.0, and we were surprised to discover that their (compressed) size grew from 18 MB to about 200 MB. This post gives a survey of our findings...

You are comparing different things. OCaml strength is safety, it verifies at compile time that your program is safe, correct apart algorithmic errors. Once it compiles, you are almost sure it is going to work. Go does not give any such guarantee.

And among "safe" languages, OCaml is probably the most efficient, generating fast code running with a small memory footprint.

Moreover, although its development was a little slow in the last years, they have recently restarted working on it, on optimizations and soon multicore support, so I would wait a little before making more comparisons.