[sanufar]

OCaml’s REPL is lovely, but I found myself having some friction with initial startup. The build/package system was pretty convoluted, and I ended up choosing JS’s Core stdlib for my needs (a simple compiler). With the new multicore release it’d be cool to see OCaml in some more practical projects!

[paulsmith]

As an OCaml-curious, is this the community recommendation, to choose the Jane Street stdlib if you’re just getting started?

[tlavoie]

It's probably the path of least resistance if following the Real World OCaml book (https://dev.realworldocaml.org/), which is quite excellent.

[debugnik]

Many learning materials will push you that way, but the vast majority of FOSS packages don't use it.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using Jane Street's stdlibs if you miss the goodies they provide, but be aware the API suffers breaking changes from time to time and they support less targets than regular OCaml. I personally stopped using them, and use a few libraries from dbunzli and c-cube instead to fill the gaps.