Hacker News

Neocaml – Rubocop Creator's New OCaml Mode for Emacs

80 points by TheWiggles 4 days ago | 12 comments

riffraff 13 hours ago

I think Bozhidar's other projects[0][1][2] are more relevant as "credentials" for an Emacs mode, although probably more niche :)

[0] Projectile, a project mode https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile

[1] Cider, a clojure mode https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider

[2] Prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

mark_l_watson 10 hours ago

Good projects. I have only used Clojure professionally for about 2 years out of the last 15 years but I lived in Cider.

When I bought my new laptop a few months ago I consciously and purposefully refused to install VSCode, just improved my Emacs setup for all writing and programming - and I have been happier for it.

eduction 8 hours ago

For context for those not aware, CIDER is probably the #1 Clojure repl in terms of popularity for day to day work.

beanjuiceII 10 hours ago

great news Bozhidar always makes fantastic stuff

jasperry 9 hours ago

I was satisfied with Tuareg + Merlin for OCaml development in Emacs, it just worked for me and didn't break when I upgraded packages, but yes, this being from bbatsov is a strong incentive to try it out. My only concern is that it uses tree-sitter, which I try to avoid because of the messiness of the JavaScript ecosystem.

natrys 8 hours ago

I think tree-sitter's relationship with JavaScript is entirely syntactic. You don't need any JS runtime installed to write grammars, because technically tree-sitter CLI already has a JS runtime included and using that it converts your grammar first to an intermediate JSON format, then it generates parser code in C. And then this C code gets compiled into a shared library, which is what editors like Emacs use, so to use tree-sitter modules you definitely don't need a JS runtime either.

kleiba 12 hours ago

Aren't there specific IDEs for OCaml like for more mainstream languages?

avsm 12 hours ago

I just use the OCaml Platform VSCode extension: (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ocamllab...) or the OCaml LSP server: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp in other editors and don't really need anything domain specific.

ecshafer 10 hours ago

Vim/Emacs/Sublime (And now things like VSC/Helix) are more than sufficient for coding without an IDE. Autocomplete scripts, the terminal, build scripts, etc work great. Now with LSP you can turn any editor into an IDE pretty trivially.

nesarkvechnep 11 hours ago

You answered it yourself. More mainstream languages have specific IDEs and OCaml is not more mainstream.

kstrauser 9 hours ago

What’s the specific Rust IDE?

jhck 7 hours ago

There is RustRover from JetBrains.