[danielmason]

Reason describes itself as "a meta language toolchain to build systems rapidly", which seems a little vague to me. Am I understanding correctly that Reason is both a (kind of) alternative compiler for OCaml's build toolchain, and a dialect of OCaml in its own right?

To tie this back to Bucklescript, does this loosely describe the process of using Reason syntax to author Javascript? Reason file -> (Reason) -> OCaml executable code -> (Bucklescript) -> Javascript

[sgrove]

If you'll forgive the shameless plug, I talked a bit about ReasonML here, hopefully it helps clear things up https://youtu.be/QWfHrbSqnB0?t=29m34s

Basically, just a new syntax and a blessed-stack approach that really, really emphasizes developer experience. Which is to say, ReasonML is merely a cosmetic and DX change, it remains compatible and is not a fork of OCaml at all.

[danielmason]

Thanks, that's very helpful!

[chenglou]

Think Elixir for Erlang.

Currently it's a syntax on top of OCaml. But we'd like to polish the OCaml ecosystem tooling too; we're calling the umbrella project "Reason".

[swuecho]

That will be great. Ocaml is great language, but not that user friendly.

Elixir is pretty mature nowadays. Reason still have a long way to go. Hope that will happen.

[jonahx]

> Currently it's a syntax on top of OCaml.

Does this just mean it compiles to OCaml?

[chenglou]

There's a crucial distinction! OCaml's compilation command takes in a `-pp` flag (preprocessor), which accepts a command that takes in a file and outputs an OCaml AST tree. We're basically using that. In that sense, the official OCaml syntax is really just that: another syntax like Reason, but official, and goes back two decades.

Because of the clean mapping from one syntax to another, you can toggle between the two fairly easily: https://github.com/facebook/reason/wiki/Newcomer-Tips-&-Tric...

[jonahx]

Interesting. Thanks for explaining that.