[thingification]

> Frontend there is that ReasonML/Reason/ReScript thing that Facebook it trying to do. It offers an alternative syntax but nearly nobody uses it because they changed the name and I think also the syntax three times already. So it is all a mess.

"Nobody" uses ReasonML / Reason.

Plenty of people use ReScript.

I wasn't a big fan of the ReScript split, but I think by now it's unfair to speak of these as if they're one community with a confusing story. I think it's very fair to say it's now two separate communities: ReScript and OCaml. It was very confusing for a while, but by now it actually is much easier to understand than before the ReScript split:

ReScript is really its own language now. The compiler for that language just happens to still understand OCaml syntax, for now. The ReScript language and community is focused on the JS ecosystem, with readable JS output.

OCaml has js_of_ocaml. JSOO compiles OCaml to JS, so it's focused on the OCaml ecosystem. The JS output is not readable but you can build "any" OCaml program.

Really that's the main story -- not so hard to grasp?

There is also melange, but that's a relatively new effort in the OCaml community (attracting OCaml-y refugees from ReScript) whose status I haven't formed a view on yet. The idea is to compile OCaml programs to readable JS. Reason used to do that, but Reason now only has a tiny community (and I believe it now uses JSOO?). ReScript still does that, but using it for that purpose is no longer supported.

[Zababa]

> The compiler for that language just happens to still understand OCaml syntax, for now.

I think another important point is that the compiler is a fork of the OCaml compiler. That means that to contribute/maintain the compiler, you need to know OCaml. This is probably going to stay this way for a very long time, since the speed of the compiler is important.

> Really that's the main story -- not so hard to grasp?

What's not helping is that the people around Reason never really said "it's dead, move on to OCaml or Rescript". The pages for things like Reason Native, Esy, ReasonML are still up.

[thingification]

> I think another important point is that the compiler is a fork of the OCaml compiler. That means that to contribute/maintain the compiler, you need to know OCaml. This is probably going to stay this way for a very long time, since the speed of the compiler is important.

Important to the maintainers, absolutely -- but not directly important to users of course: it's firmly the goal that you don't need to know any OCaml to use ReScript (and I think it's mostly true by now).

> What's not helping is that the people around Reason never really said "it's dead, move on to OCaml or Rescript". The pages for things like Reason Native, Esy, ReasonML are still up.

I assume they'd say they're not dead. I think Jord Walke, for example, didn't want to break his commitment to existing users using it for native projects, so put in effort to help people switch to a JSOO-based Reason (I haven't followed that story, so not sure how that turned out). I think that's good behaviour.

They certainly have a far smaller community than before though, because most people went to either ReScript or OCaml, or kept a foot in both communities for different uses (and no doubt some left entirely).

[Zababa]

> Important to the maintainers, absolutely -- but not directly important to users of course: it's firmly the goal that you don't need to know any OCaml to use ReScript (and I think it's mostly true by now).

That's true, and according to the maintainers, with the recent improvements it should be easy to maintain. And using tools written in other languages is not a first for JavaScript users (ESBuild comes to mind).

[dropofwill]

That's the main story for targeting JS, but reason native is not dead (unless something has changed recently, I haven't been actively working with it for a while).