Comment by Lyngbakr

Comment by Lyngbakr 2 days ago

3 replies

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"?

noahbp 2 days ago

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.

  • anentropic 2 days ago

    (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.

  • johnisgood 2 days ago

    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).