Reason/OCaml is truly a secret weapon, beating the averages and all. The reach this language has is incredible. Whether you work on React UIs, REST/GraphQL servers, desktop apps, Unix systems programming, or even unikernels, it never feels like the wrong tool for the job and is always fun all the way through.
OCaml was my first serious language, and while I think it's a bit weak for "programming in the large" (cumbersome types, typeclasses, lack of type annotations sometimes hurts) I'm still incredibly fond of it. Unfortunately, I haven't had much experience using it recently, as most of my work is in Python / Scala etc.
I'm assuming you're a current, up-to-date user, so I'd like to ask you:
- what are the current reasonable options for a StdLib? Last I checked, the default lib was still very poor, while JaneStreet's I found barely documented.
- Multicore I guess I can forgive, it's not like there are any other modern GC languages that make multi-threading particularly easy (with the possible exception of Java).
- What's an example of a recent codebase written in "modern" OCaml / Reason?
I do use ocaml-graphql-server and such a lot to write small services, but I often don't interact with databases or build complex backends that would require a bigger back-end webdev ecosystem. Most of my native development happens far from the cloud, and mostly around CLI and GUI tools for which I adore OCaml and recently Reason (https://github.com/revery-ui/revery).
> cumbersome types, typeclasses, lack of type annotations sometimes hurts
I've grown to really like the explicitness of OCaml actually. Nothing implicit or circular, and I can just read a module from top to bottom. The lack of type annotations don't bother me as much with tools such as Merlin, and I find that the amazing type inference lets me prototype code as fast as dynamic languages.
> - what are the current reasonable options for a StdLib? Last I checked, the default lib was still very poor, while JaneStreet's I found barely documented.
I use Containers (https://github.com/c-cube/ocaml-containers/), Lwt, and a few other small libraries like Rresult and Bos pretty heavily. For a big application with many contributors I'd still suggest giving Core another try as it's very well thought out and extensive (compared to npm-style dozens of dependencies you need to introduce with different API designs). I must say that even though I'm pretty used to reading type signatures and jumping to interface files for documentation (and even prefer it to tutorial style docs in markdown), and wouldn't say Core's documentation is _poor_, I agree with you at some level. Because of how it's built and split up across different packages and modules, it gets pretty tiring having to power through many levels of indirection every time you want to look something up.
> - Multicore I guess I can forgive, it's not like there are any other modern GC languages that make multi-threading particularly easy (with the possible exception of Java).
I find that, compared to some other languages I've used, my naive and readable implementation in OCaml last much longer before I need to optimize it. I do use Lwt_preemptive threads that call C code and subprocesses often, but usually because of the nature of the problem I'm solving and not as a parallelization technique.
> - What's an example of a recent codebase written in "modern" OCaml / Reason?
Most open source projects I can think of are libraries and tools such as compilers, but here are some real-world applications off the top of my head:
- https://github.com/onivim/oni2 (native, desktop)
- https://github.com/SVdotCO/pupilfirst (bucklescript, react)
- https://github.com/Schniz/fnm (native, CLI)
Some of the cool stuff I saw in the wild:
https://github.com/osener?language=reason&tab=stars
https://github.com/osener?language=ocaml&tab=stars
Hope this helps! I think with the recent convergence around tools such as dune, opam, esy, it is a great time to start writing OCaml again.