When comparing Elixir vs OCaml, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” Elixir is ranked 3rd while OCaml is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great for concurrency
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Pro Great getting started tutorials
The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly.
Pro Powerful metaprogramming
Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself.
Pro Full access to Erlang functions
You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html
Pro Scalability
Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers.
More details can be found here.
Pro Great as a first functional programming language!
Pro Great documentation
Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal.
Pro Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP
All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love.
Pro Easy to download libraries
Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get
Pro Actively-developed functional programming language at the forefront of research
Functional programming is based on the lambda calculus. OCaml is in its functional parts almost pure lambda calculus, in a very practical manner: useful for many daily programming tasks. The acitve development makes improvements to the type system like generalized algebraic data types (GADT) or polymorphic variants, so when learning this language you get at once a down to earth usable compiler and advanced abstraction features.
Pro Encourages functional style
It steers you towards a functional style, but doesn't bother you with purity and "monads everywhere" like other languages, such as Haskell.
Pro No windows!
Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows
Lacks native support for Windows systems.
Pro Sophisticated and easy-to-use package manager
OPAM is a package manager for OCaml, which is really easy to use, just like npm. It creates a .opam folder in home directory.
The documentation is great as well, and you can switch between multiple versions of OCaml for each project. You can also package your project and publish it on OPAM repositories, even if the dependencies do not exists on OPAM.
Pro One of the best for writing compilers
OCaml is compiled to native binary, so it's amazingly fast. Being a member of ML-family languages, it has expressive syntax for trees, and has great LLVM support.
Pro Stable syntax
The syntax is consistent, some syntaxic sugar but at a reasonable level, so reading code of others isn't too much confusing.
Pro Strong editor integration
The merlin
editor tool provides all you need to develop OCaml in your favourite editor.
Cons
Con Deployment is still not as easy as it should be
Con Some design choices may seem strange
Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird:
Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end
or
receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end
Con Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows
Lacks native support for Windows systems.