DevotionGeo

DevotionGeo

What is your opinion about Caramel, the OCaml compiler with Erlang backend?

@rvirding
@OvermindDL1

Most Liked

ostera

ostera

Creator of Caramel

Thanks! :raised_hands: Happy to be here :smile:

OCaml and Reason aren’t at the scale of TypeScript or Elixir, but they have a loyal and caring community :slight_smile:

Oh boy it is! :grin:

I actually started making a type-checker for Erlang, as I wanted to really understand what were the hard parts about it. I chose to cram in a well-typed language into Erlang and try to get the same program out of Erlang afterwards, and thus Caramel as an OCaml to Erlang compiler was born.

The next milestone I’m working towards is actually recovering the type information from the generated Erlang programs to verify that the compilation is sound.

I think anyone dealing with complex state machines should seriously consider this. Having a type-level representation of your business domain logic can be incredibly useful to rule out illegal representations, making them entirely unrepresentable, and having a tool tell you pretty much instantly if you’re about to do something you shouldn’t do.

Rapid prototyping and fearless refactors on large codebases are two other things that I really enjoy in OCaml, and that you would be able to get through Caramel as well.

Well, yes it does! OCaml is a highly expressive language, and building type-safe DSLs in it for specific problems is fairly common amongst the more idiomatic users. Check cmdliner as an example, or fmt.

In addition, the OCaml module system is by far the most powerful (and still type-safe) one I’ve seen put to production, so it should help with code reuse, enforcing codebase conventions, and large-scale refactors as well.

Indeed, there’s a lot of tradeoffs being made here. For example, the OCaml object system (OOP support) will not be supported in the current compilation mode. Same goes for other features like first-class modules (treating an entire module of code as a value), or mutability.

I am however experimenting with ways in which some of the existing ecosystem codebase that is not trivially translatable can be made usable from within the BEAM by means of generating NIFs. We do have a lot of type-information to guide this process :slight_smile:

Hope this helps :raised_hands:

davearonson

davearonson

Sounds :sunglasses: sweet!

rvirding

rvirding

Creator of Erlang

I think the idea is very good. I don’t have any feeling for how popular OCaml is so I don’t know if it will bring more users into the Erlang Ecosystem.

And I must say that personally I think implementing languages is a lot of fun. :smile:

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

KyleHunter
What is a good language for beginners to make apps like snapchat and instagram?
New
axelson
Can anyone recommend a tmux session switcher? I’ve used https://github.com/siadat/session-finder in the past but it’s not very actively m...
New
chasekaylee
Hi everyone! I have been in the professional industry for ~2 years now coming from a boot camp. I started a base foundation by programmin...
New
chasekaylee
Just like the title says :smiley: which courses you find that have had the most impact in the span of your career as a developer?
New
mjk
TL;DR: words that incorporate negation are acceptable, eg. independent, asymmetric, nondeterministic. An example in the book is to renam...
New
AstonJ
Just been adding some more portals, currently have the following languages: Apache Groovy C C# C++ Clojure CoffeeScript Crystal ...
New
Exadra37
I am a Linux user since 2012, more or less, and I always use Ubuntu on my computers, and my last 2 laptops have been used Thinkpads, wher...
New
New
ivanhercaz
Hi! I usually keep changelogs for my projects because I think they are really useful, not only to track the changes and not to be lost b...
New
harwind
I’m working on a Spring Boot project and I have a controller where I want to map multiple request paths to a single method. Let’s say I h...
New

Other popular topics Top

DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
AstonJ
poll poll Be sure to check out @Dusty’s article posted here: An Introduction to Alternative Keyboard Layouts It’s one of the best write-...
New
AstonJ
Inspired by this post from @Carter, which languages, frameworks or other tech or tools do you think is killing it right now? :upside_down...
New
gagan7995
API 4 Path: /user/following/ Method: GET Description: Returns the list of all names of people whom the user follows Response [ { ...
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
AstonJ
If you get Can't find emacs in your PATH when trying to install Doom Emacs on your Mac you… just… need to install Emacs first! :lol: bre...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
CommunityNews
A Brief Review of the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet. Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information fo...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New