I wonder if anyone has used Jane Street's open source OCaml libraries and tools for somewhat serious projects.
I took a brief look at these things, and my impression is that their stuff isn't "ready" for anyone outside Jane Street, even though they put a lot of effort in building the ecosystem and open source their code.
I do! Their standard lib replacement was used on the project where I originally learned ocaml, so I have just always used it. You have to be fairly sophisticated at reading fn signatures to find things sometimes but otherwise no complaints with it. It has some very nice features too for example convert functions to/from sexps for all base types can save you a ton of time if you know it's there and plan for it.
I've used some of their other libraries too, their logging and unit test ppx are common maybe even de facto standards as much as the ocaml world has such a thing. I've also used, off the top of my head, their code formatter, one of their test frameworks, their implementations of some advanced data structures.
Sometimes you do run into one like the other commenter said, where that shit just does not work. It depends on an undocumented something they shipped separately, or needs a secret bit of config or whatever. These aren't malicious, I open a ticket and come back in a year or two often they'll be working.
It's not zero frustration but I appreciate their approach of just throwing everything over rather than spending more resources testing and polishing fewer releases. Their code quality is generally very high and even if I can't get something working directly, it provides a rigorous & vetted example implementation.
Thanks! The "depends on an undocumented thing" happens quite often for such projects from companies, and is enough to hold people back -- in a company where a third party library requires approval, such issues mean that a fix could take a while before it is available internally, which could delay your own work etc. A lot of this probably comes down to the ecosystem -- not enough people are using these things to discover them early.
I'm running tests for an involved math research project, and to my great surprise Lean 4 << Haskell << OCaml in execution times (so far).
I love Lean 4, but good luck getting help with it from AI. Today's project-in-progress is digesting their reference manual to fit well within a 200K context window. We'll see if that helps.
I took a brief look at these things, and my impression is that their stuff isn't "ready" for anyone outside Jane Street, even though they put a lot of effort in building the ecosystem and open source their code.