Hi Mafinar, I would recommend my post to get started: Practical OCaml - DEV Community . It walks through setting up with a few common libraries.

I don’t actually include Jane Street’s Core/Base because I usually don’t reach for them. That’s one of the, in my opinion, issues with Real World OCaml: it very heavily relies on and presents Core as ‘the alternative standard library that everyone should use’ when in reality it’s a very heavyweight dependency that usually only large applications can justify. It’s also not ported to Windows (same with Jane Street’s Async, which is why I recommend Lwt for concurrency).

I think it’s a good idea to start with the libraries that are shipped with OCaml:

• core library (note, not Jane Street Core), this lists the built-in types and exceptions of the language
• standard library (Stdlib), this provides a lot of functionality, especially in recent OCaml versions. Especially important: List, String, Set, Map, Hashtbl, Printf. Also look into Sys (e.g. Sys.getenv) and Filename (file name operations, portable directory separator, etc.)
• unix library (Unix system calls), the name is a slight misnomer as it also (mostly) works on Windows.

So that leaves the final note–instead of Real World OCaml, I would actually recommend Cornell’s Functional Programming in OCaml, which is based on their lecture notes for their course, with a long history of teaching OCaml (and doesn’t rely on any alternative standard libraries).

By the way, I am enjoying this thread a lot and will be happy to jump in as well if any questions

I’m looking forward! ^.^

If you have questions about OCaml or so, don’t hesitate to ping me. ^.^

Same. Looking forward! I have started and stopped several times during the last year. There’s always something missing.

Last time I was pretty close to daily productivity however. I learned esy, a builder for OCaml, and was able to also use the LSP (merlin) to check for errors in my Emacs, plus to auto-format code.