Feed on
Posts
Comments

Why Objective Caml?

Aug 29th, 2006 by Phil Dawes

The previous posts may have given the impression that I’m learning various languages for the sake of higher academic enlightenment. Actually the core reason is much simpler: I’ve got some performance intensive code to write, python just didn’t cut it, and in the computer language shootout benchmarks OCaml consistently kicks the collective butts of all the other popular language implementations I’m familiar with, including python, scheme, perl, ruby and java.

That’s not a good enough reason on its own, but from first impressions Objective Caml appears to tick enough other boxes to be a real ‘primary language’ contender.

Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, ocaml | Comments

Viewing 2 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    > OCaml consistently kicks the collective butts...

    Strange that you compared OCaml to the slower Java -client instead of Java -server
    [Java -server](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ocaml&lang2=java)

    Strange not to compare OCaml with other compiled languages rather than with interpreted languages like Python, Perl and Ruby.
    • ^
    • v
    There is one more benefit from programming in OCaml compared with Python, Lisp, Java, etc. It is the comparably strong type system and automatic types inference.

    I also chose OCaml to program arithmetic and I am really very pleased with my choice.

    Nowdays I use OCaml to do many other things as well, and learning OCaml and functional programming was an enlightening experience.

    So, wish you good luck
close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus