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Why F#?

(batsov.com)
438 points bozhidar | 4 comments | 01 Apr 25 12:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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darksaints ◴[01 Apr 25 18:08 UTC] No.43549778[source]▶
I'm completely convinced that F# (along with Scala, Haskell, and OCaml) adoption has stalled due to having ridiculously bad build systems. More significantly, they are being passed up in favor of Rust, which is a great language but nonetheless a bad fit for a lot of problem domains, simply because Rust has a superior build system. Hell, 80% of the reason I choose Rust over C++ for embedded work is because of the build system.

It baffles me that there are languages with non-profit foundations and are financially backed by multiple corporations which still have bad build systems. It is the most important investment you can make into a programming language.

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1. Lyngbakr ◴[01 Apr 25 21:02 UTC] No.43551301[source]▶
While I've never used it in anger, I really quite like dune. Was there something specific that makes you characterise it as "ridiculously bad"?
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2. noahbp ◴[02 Apr 25 01:14 UTC] No.43552853[source]▶
Not Dune exactly, but having to run 'eval $(opam env)' in the terminal every time you open an OCaml project rather than the default being npm-like, where you can just open the directory and use the package manager command without having to think about it.
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3. anentropic ◴[02 Apr 25 10:17 UTC] No.43555245[source]▶
(writing all the below while being aware you likely know much more about OCaml than I do...!)

Possibly `eval $(opam env)` is something that should just go in your ~/.zshrc

The OCaml folks have done some work recently to improve the onboarding documentation, which I think is going in a positive direction

e.g. https://ocaml.org/docs/installing-ocaml (the eval as a one-off post install command)

And then guiding people to use 'switches' https://ocaml.org/docs/opam-switch-introduction, which I totally missed when I started with the language.

> Local switches are automatically selected based on the current working directory.

4. johnisgood ◴[02 Apr 25 12:31 UTC] No.43555920[source]▶
The only issues I've had with OCaml's build system is using "ocamlopt", "ocamlbuild", "ocamlfind" manually, but this was solved by OASIS and now Dune. I don't need to think about it. It automatically compiles when I save the file in Emacs. Very easy to set it up (one time setup).