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0 pointsresoluteteeth4y ago0 comments

I don't think it's that different at the moment but they apparently wanted to not be constrained by reason/ocaml compatibility going forward.

Reason seems to be pretty dead so now the relationship between ocaml and rescript is kind of like that between haskell and purescript.

This may be good if you only want to run it on the frontend but it's not as good if you're using ocaml on the backend and want to share code, but I guess there's js_of_ocaml

I also don't think the existence of rescript is in itself a bad thing, it's just that the whole confusion around reason/rescript may have harmed development of ocaml for a while.

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sidkshatriya4y ago· 2 in thread

> whole confusion around reason/rescript may have harmed development of ocaml for a while

OCaml is an anchor language for many important projects (e.g. Coq) and companies (INRIA, Janestreet etc). The momentum behind OCaml has grown and I don't think the rescript/reason separation affected it _that_ much.

But I am curious to know if rescript/reason issue harmed rescript. While rescript gained a lot of technical freedom from the breakaway from OCaml it lost some people along the way. Was the breakaway worth it in retrospect?

dmitriid4y ago

> if rescript/reason issue harmed rescript.

Personal anecdote: yes, it has.

I was very interested in Reason when it appeared, and it seemed to have immense momentum: exploring arguably better (or more familiar) syntax, tool integrations etc. I know that people ran regular OCaml workflows/projects with it.

And then the whole split happened ... why? "We don't want to be constrained by OCaml" while keeping all of OCaml's syntactic idiosyncrasies among other things doesn't sound like a proper, well, reason.

This is where I stopped being interested (and as I imagine, many people stopped, too). Because a slit in a niche miniature language (which it was at the time) means only one thing: not enough resources to continue with either one.

It doesn't help that the whole split was confusing to everyone. Good description here: https://ersin-akinci.medium.com/confused-about-rescript-resc...

sidkshatriya4y ago

I too lost interest in Reason/Rescript after Rescript became its own thing.

A lot of talent has moved onto other things (or stayed with Reason) with arguably minor gains for Rescript in terms of technical freedom gained.

Typescript is so dominant in this space that it really didn't make sense to split an already small community.

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