[emacdona]

Never played with OCaml, but I spent the past few days learning about F# (my understanding is that it inherits a lot from OCaml). Tooling seemed great: I used JetBrains Rider; VSCode and Visual Studio are also options. Support seemed great: good official docs; good book choices. Ecosystem seemed great: entire .Net class library.

I’m been on the JVM for 20+ years, but an opportunity came up to leverage some of my other experience to get some CLR work… and I dove in.

[rpeden]

F# has diverged from OCaml a bit, but they're still very similar.

I mentioned in a top-level comment that F#'s "lightweight" syntax is basically what I want when I use OCaml. I know ReasonML is a thing, but if I'm writing OCaml I don't want it to look more JavaScripty - I prefer syntax like "match x with" over "switch(x)" for pattern matching, for example.

I know some people dislike the way F#'s newer syntax makes whitespace significant, and that's fair. But the older verbose syntax is there if you need or want to use it. For example, something like

  let things = 
    let a = 1 in
    let b = 2 in
    let c = 3 in 
    doSomething a b c

should still work in F# like it would in OCaml.

[yawaramin]

> F#'s "lightweight" syntax is basically what I want

It's actually not that far off. For definitions that don't need to be self-referential you can use 'and':

    let things =
      let a = 1
      and b = 2
      and c = 3 in
      do_something a b c

[sealeck]

F# tooling is much, much better than OCaml's

[akkad33]

I used to fiddle with F#, its tooling is good, but it's interweaved with too much dotnet c# cruft and also there's the dark shadow of Microsoft. I wish it had zero cost abstractions like Rust because most things you write in F# is also slower than C#