[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).