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by jon_smark
4847 days ago
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There are several reasons why one would prefer OCaml over F#: - OCaml is not tied to .NET. Obviously the converse also applies: if you need .NET integration then F# might be a better choice. - F# does not support some of the more advanced features of the OCaml type system, like polymorphic variants (open unions) and functors. These are very useful OCaml features, IMHO. - OCaml has gained some very interesting features since F# branched off, which again are not present in F#: modules as first class values, GADTs, and better control over module signatures. Overall, my recommendation is that unless you are really tied to .NET ecosystem, then OCaml is a more interesting language to learn. |
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- Even if your project doesn't need .NET integration, it's nice to have all of the .NET libraries (built-in or otherwise) at your disposal. OCaml also has some nice libraries, but nowhere near what .NET (or Java, for Scala) has -- so it's likely you'll have to implement your own library for some task if it's outside of the mainstream.
- F# has also gained some interesting features since it's branched away from OCaml -- computation expressions (syntactic sugar for monads) and type providers (automatically-generated, strongly-typed interfaces to databases, JSON APIs, etc.), for example.
- .NET has a mature and very fast garbage collector tuned for real world usage (e.g., people running C#/ASP.NET on large webservers). This hugely benefits F#'s performance.
- You can use Visual Studio or MonoDevelop to write and debug F# apps, which makes it much nicer to use in practice. (Oh, and you can get Visual Studio Express for Web if you want to use VS and F# for free.)
I don't have anything against OCaml, I just wanted to point out that F# certainly deserves consideration if you want to learn a new language (i.e., it's not a knock-off version of OCaml).