After we selected OCaml as the new language for 0install, I've been steadily converting the old Python code across. We now have more than 10,000 lines of OCaml, so I thought it's time to share what I've learnt.

OCaml is actually a pretty small language. Once you've read the short tutorials you know most of the language. However, I did skip one interesting feature during my first attempts:

There are also "polymorphic variants" which allow the same field name to be used in different structures, but I haven't tried using them.

I've since found a good use for these for handling command-line options...

In the initial language analysis, OCaml did well in most areas except for diagnostics (which turned out to have an easy solution) and shared libraries / binary compatibility. Now it's time to look for a solution to that.

In the first post, I took a brief look at the programming languages ATS, C#, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Python and Rust to try to decide which would be the best language in which to write 0install (which is currently implemented in Python). Now it's time to eliminate a few candidates and look in more detail at the others.

Last time, I converted 4 lines of Python code from 0install into each language. This time I'm converting 576 lines, so this should give a more accurate picture of how each performs for a real-world task.

This post evaluates the programming languages ATS, C#, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Python and Rust to try to decide which would be the best language in which to write 0install (which is currently implemented in Python). Hopefully it will also be interesting to anyone curious about these languages.

I'm not an expert in these languages (except Python). My test-case is to read the tutorial for each language and reimplement one trivial function of 0install in the language. These languages were suggested by various people on the 0install mailing list. If I've got anything wrong, please add a comment.