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by cardanome 1406 days ago
Elm is not dead. It just prefers a slow release schedule but is still actively worked on in the background.

That said, you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming. Super fast compiler, great performance, can target both native and JS.

It is easier to use than Haskell due to defaulting to eager evaluation (like most languages) strategy instead of laziness and being generally more pragmatic, offering more escape hatches into the imperative world if need be. Plus great upward trajectory with lot's of cool stuff like an effects system and multi-core support coming.

Real World Ocaml is a decent resource: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/

1 comments

> you might want to check out OCaml for general purpose programming

Any tips on backend frameworks to look at? I need to write a small websocket service for a side-project and have always wanted to try OCaml. I came across https://github.com/aantron/dream.

Dream is great for small http services -- I've not used the websocket support so I can't say much about it.

I do highly recommend starting with one of the Dream example projects just to lower the barrier to entry on the tooling side.

You can also use Rescript (compiles to very readable Javascript), which is the OCaml type system with more familiar syntax and some of the complexity shaved off.

You'll have a much easier time doing business stuff with F# - it's OCAML inspired but has access to broader .NET ecosystem. We're using it on front end as well w/ Fable compiler. It's pretty awesome.