One of the primary goals for the Roc project is compiler speed. I presume OCaml is out of the running because it's not a systems language.

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satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OCaml compiler is incredibly fast. I wonder how it'd fare with Jane Street's extensions for the borrow checker etc in OxCaml, if it's good enough for their HFT I'm sure it's good enough for a new language.

	▲	djha-skin 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I suspect this "not a systems language" alludes only to OCaml's rather steeper learning curve and until-recently difficulty with multiple threads. I am sure it could roll just fine as a single-threaded compiler language written by a small team, which indeed, it was.
	▲	antonvs 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wrote a toy Scheme implementation in OCaml by using the Camplp4 preprocessor. In benchmarks, it was faster than Gambit Scheme, which compiles through C.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on the beholder.

Unix system programming in OCaml

https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/

https://mirage.io/

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steveklabnik 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OCaml has often historically been considered a language that's been appropriate to write systems tooling like compilers, runtimes, and unikernels in, even though GC'd languages were/are not often considered for such projects.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They are considered in many research labs since Xerox, unfortunately there are still too much anti-GC religion among mainstream devs.

	▲	sph an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t think there’s too many of us on the ‘GC did nothing wrong’ hill. Reading the average HN opinion, it seems everybody is writing high-performance latency-sensitive systems that would implode if a response would take 1 ms longer than normal.