[Caml-list] UFO (United Forces of OCaml)

[Gour <gour@atmarama.net>]

Hello,

I'm at the beginning of learning and using OCaml which is very fine
language and I've decided to use it over Ada.

Many new things are happening like development of OPAM (very nice
project), then moving some projects to ocaml.org subdomains, new design
of the site as well...

However, there are certain things which seems like wasting of resources,
so my humble proposal is whether it is possible to make UFO - United
Forces of OCaml in order not to have too many (similar) projects
tackling the same problems.

One area which quickly comes to my mind is standard library. Although
I'm not (yet) able to conclude how much is standard library incomplete,
I see there are two larger projects trying to fill the gap.

Jane Street is calling it "'Jane Street's alternative to the standard
library", while 'batteries' are labelled as: "community-driven effort to
standardize on an consistent, documented, and comprehensive development
platform for the OCaml programming language."

For the uninitiated it's seems as attempts to solve the same problem,
but, unfortunately, it looks they're tackling it in a non-compatible
way.

It's especially sensitive considering that the RWO book -  which might
be used for many noobs to learn the language - is promoting Core, while
'community-driven' project is working on something else.

Another thing which I can think of are build systems and although I'm
aware there is certain overlap in functionality and/or interdependances,
to me it seems that there are too many of them:

a) OASIS

b) ocamlbuild

c) omake

d) ocp-build

e) yenga

f) ...

The list can be, of course, annotated by the need to have actively
developed/maintained bindings for truly multio-platform GUI bindings
(e.g. wx/Qt).

So, my naive proposal is to try to combine forces together and produce
small(er) set of tools libraries and make it somewhat 'standard' within
community. It will attract new people to the language itself by making
it (more) clear what are the standard tools to be used.

The OCaml community is, imho, not big-enough to allow such luxury of
re-inventing the wheels...

Moreover, OCaml is advertised as "general purpose industrial-strength
programming language" and it behooves to have mature fully baked
ecosystem.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
The work of a man who is unattached to the modes of material 
nature and who is fully situated in transcendental knowledge 
merges entirely into transcendence.

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