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by mirekrusin 1723 days ago
> (...) with the departure of Rescript (Bucklescript) from the OCaml community (...)

I wasn't aware anything like that is happening, is it? Rescript departed from Reason, that's all, right? They want to focus solely on js target, because... that's what rescript is. New stuff they're doing looks really good.
2 comments
Zababa 1723 days ago
The best source of information is probably this thread: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/a-short-history-of-rescript-buck...
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mirekrusin 1723 days ago
Yes, thank you, I don't see any OCalm depart there, just depart from ReasonML is mentioned.
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Zababa 1723 days ago
I think the "depart" is not supporting newer OCaml feature. While Rescript/ReasonML at first was just an alternative syntax, it has now become a standalone programming language.
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mirekrusin 1722 days ago
I'm sure they'll support new features that apply to rescript runtime context.

Things that don't make sense in javascript runtime context should not be supported.

Backward compatiblity on OCaml side is also something they don't need to care about as its ephemeral - it must typecheck and spit out valid javascript code, that's all.

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sidkshatriya 1723 days ago
What I meant is that Rescript is not really tied to OCaml as strongly as it was before. The connection before was: ReasonML frontend + Bucklescript compiler backend. Now you just have Rescript which is a rebranding of Bucklescript with a more focussed front-end language (which is a subset of ReasonML).

ReasonML aims to supports all of the OCaml syntax while Rescript's aim is to preserve only that syntax that is beneficial for a JS target.

ReasonML syntax can be used to do backend OCaml programming as well as front end programming. Rescript is focussed only on the (browser) frontend and drops some features from ReasonML. Its all quite complex and confusing but the TL;DR according to me is that ReasonML syntax is not going to be as important in the OCaml community as before...

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mirekrusin 1723 days ago
I don't think ReScript is a subset of ReasonML. It's forked language that already has some substantial differences and will keep diverging.

ReScript is very active. ReasonML is dead for quite a while now. I'm pretty sure ReScript will drop ReasonML syntax soon?

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sidkshatriya 1721 days ago
> It's forked language that already has some substantial differences and will keep diverging.

This is really about opinion and individual assessment. It depends on how much emphasis one assigns to surface syntax vs deep language features.

Yes, the surface syntax of Rescript has been cleaned up a bit. There are some new language features but the language is still "close" to OCaml/ReasonML as of end 2021 according to me. If you're able to understand OCaml/ReasonML today you won't have much problem reading Rescript.

But, yes, it is diverging and it could look very different in the coming years.

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