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0 pointsyawaramin7mo ago0 comments

Re: the 'external lubrary' criticism. In Rust everybody says just use serde for serializing data and anyhow for error handling. But suddenly when we say use a ppx deriver in OCaml for effectively the same thing–serializing a type to a string–it's a huge problem. That's weird to me.

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quamserena7mo ago· 1 in thread

I’m not a fan of serde either. I wish there was a way to have foreign derives (or even better: compile-time reflection). There wasn’t a great way to serialize things in Rust in the standard library and the ecosystem crystalized around serde, which is suboptimal imo. There are libraries like facet[0] that implement general reflection, rather than just a subset of it, but it probably won't be supported by all of your dependencies.

[0] https://github.com/facet-rs/facet

yawaraminOP7mo ago

This is kinda my point. I wonder why OCaml gets a full 'pain points' blog post, but Rust's error handling gets just a 'it's annoying but it's actually good'. Like I wonder why OCaml doesn't get a 'these parts are annoying but here is why they are actually good'. This is a pattern I see a lot with people coming from other languages (especially Rust). They have a tendency to over-emphasize the pain points and downplay the strengths (a single line at the end of the post, which is in my opinion the most important one–despite its flaws OCaml is the best choice for your use case).

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