The State of Full-Stack OCaml (with António Monteiro)

OCaml has one of the best-loved compilers available, and parts of it are surprisingly pluggable, so it’s not surprising that someone would eventually try to wed OCaml with JavaScript and the web browser. In fact, the ecosystem has gone further, and there are now a bevvy of options for people who want to write OCaml and run it in the browser, or want to write OCaml in the browser, or want to write something that looks like JavaScript but runs OCaml on the backend.

Joining me to explore the OCaml-meets-JavaScript world is António Montiero. He’s a key maintainer/contributor for Melange and ReasonML, as well as several other interesting OCaml web projects.

We kick off by discussing the benefits of OCaml and how it clicked with him personally, before we dive into how and why the compiler is being adapted and tweaked to take it to a whole new audience of web-hungry developers.

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0:00 Intro
1:58 Antonio's OCaml Origin Story
4:41 The Core Benefits of OCaml
6:43 Was There A Moment When It Clicked?
9:14 The OCaml Compiler Ecosystem
20:30 What is Melange?
28:16 Does This Make OCaml A Full-Stack Language?
37:05 What Are The Hardest Parts To Write?
40:01 Replicating OCaml's Module System
55:15 Would WASM Be An Easier Compilation Target?
1:00:30 Can You Write React From OCaml?
1:08:11 Building The Melange Playground
1:14:31 Getting Started With Melange
1:19:36 So What's The Next Step For Melange?
1:25:35 Outro

[lolifedog]

Great show, thank you for helping to give non mainstream languages like Ocaml the exposure they deserve

[valentinussofa]

OCaml is such a funny language because it has so much stuff that almost no one even knows exists. 
~Antonio Monteiro~

[psij]

Love you, Kris! Thank you for this awesome channel and for always bringing quality content!

[samsinite]

Love this show, stumbled upon it a few months ago and listen to most episodes. The host mentioned that he would rather write typescript than JavaScript. Imo typescript can get messy fast with generics, I’d rather just be in JavaScript or even better an actual functional language with types like reason, ocaml, or purescript if I am going with types.

[PaulSebastianManole]

28:18 also add F# with Fable compiler. I am surprised it doesn't get talked about more.

[TheHubra]

good video, despite not caring about either JS or ocaml 👍

[stroiman.development]

1:07:00 Writing the tools to be able to build the application you want, and never get to write the application you want. I worked on a Go/HTMX stack project, but lacked proper tools for testing - so I started writing a headless browser in Go - which can now handle basic HTMX apps - but now I'm just adding support for other frameworks ... and the original web site never proceeded any further.

[snatvb]

17:15 there is no war about autocurry - it's nice and good feature. But developers faced with some nasty bugs with it and it's hard to fix. You will have possibility to curry it with `_` or `%` like
let add5 = sum(5, _)

[snatvb]

59:00 ofc no, wasm have possibility to use shared memory, send bytes and primitives
main problem - wasm doesn't have any direct bindings to DOM and any browser api. WASM hided in sandbox that limits real performance
but if course you can use it for highload features. for example it you need to parse and handle huge text (like analyzing and transpling) wasm will be nice choice

[pierofuriesi]

I was a contributor of Ocsigen, what about it nowadays?

[Anonymouzee]

melange is the spice... yo need to see ReasonML!!! 🤣

[MarekFajkus]

Funny. Just yesterday I wrote micro runtime for JS for algebraic effects using continuation passing.

[uwot]

I've listened to a bit over half an hour and what's described sounds like an absolute mess of half a dozen partially overlapping language dialects and projects. I'm not convinced this state of play is actually positive for OCaml.