Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariOCaml vs Common Lisp
When comparing OCaml vs Common Lisp, the Slant community recommends Common Lisp 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?” Common Lisp is ranked 4th while OCaml is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Common Lisp is:
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Carefully designed for interactive use
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
Pro Very Powerful REPL with SLIME
SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs).
Pro Condition/restart system
It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL.
Pro Image based runtime
The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program.
Pro Almost as fast as, or faster than, C
Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code.
Cons
Con Strong focus on *nix systems, lacking native support for MS Windows
Lacks native support for Windows systems.
