[Ocaml-biz] limits, libraries, technical markets

[Brandon J. Van Every]

A phenom in OCaml that very much concerns me:

- OCaml has some wart in its core functionality, like 31-bit ints, or
4MB array sizes, or string size limitations.

- various libraries solve these problems

- but you must know about and use these libraries to solve these
problems.  It is not at all obvious looking at OCaml for the first time.

We'll have to be teaching Bigarray to get around array sizes, OCamlnet
to get around string and file sizes.  A plethora of libraries to deal
with warts, rather than a unified core that doesn't have them.  I see
these problems as weakening the value proposition of OCaml for a
business.

This could depend on the business, however.  I'd expect highly technical
or engineering oriented businesses to be far less concerned about such
warts, as they're used to things being ugly.  I'd expect corporate
enterprises to throw hissies about this sort of thing, and distribute
whitepapers that "OCaml didn't work" because they kept getting bit in
the ass by various limits or library learning curves.

I am suggesting it would be better for OCaml to chase technical or
engineering markets at this time.  I don't think it's polished enough to
take on Java and C# in the corporate enterprise yet.  Also, tech /
engineering markets want both performance and reliability, the 2 core
OCaml strengths.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

OCaml offers superior high level language features,
superior type safety, and performance.
http://caml.inria.fr