wrote an article here about Elm Language, if you are interested in Reason ML, take your time to read about Elm, too.

I have also written about my experience of being in a Melb Js meetup one of the talks was about Reason ML by Keira Hodgkison.

In the conclusion of Elm, we have a problem accessing DOM (which is possible with a trick) and another issue was not having a server rendering which also they are working on. Hopefully in future, we can see that the community is working more on this language to make it better.

In this article, I am going to talk more about another interesting language, ReasonML, developed and maintained by Facebook. Simple, fast & type-safe code that leverages the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems.

What is ReasonML?

ReasonML feels much like what you would get if you cleaned up JavaScript and turned it into a statically typed functional programming language.

What is OCaml?

OCaml is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles

• A powerful type system
• User-definable algebraic data types and pattern-matching
• Automatic memory management
• A sophisticated module system
• An expressive object-oriented layer
• Efficient native code compilers

I know the syntax is different, seems more like C, but it is a strong language developed by researchers over 20 years.

And ReasonML is using OCaml!

Integration to workflow

ReasonML compiling to CommonJS modules means that we can replace our codebase on a module-by-module basis and migrate in batches.

• Libraries: Complete OCaml standard library
• Build System: Bucklescript build tools, webpack bs-loader
• Package Management: npm
• Error Messages: Elm style, very friendly
• Editor Support: Atom, VIM, VSCode
• Support Channels: Discord ReasonML
• Reason ML has been developed by Facebook, of course we have a good solution to use it with React here.

Reason vs Elm

• Reason is supported by Facebook
• Reason complies Faster
• Reason is simpler but less safe
• Reason is not pure functional
• In Reason you have access to DOM.
• Reason works on the server
• Reason is also supports OCaml, AML, Intel, ARM and other platforms

ReasonML seems like a new take on the same concept that has been explored by the Elm framework. Even so, the options taken by this project and its backers seem much more promising both from marketing and technological points-of-view.

Problems

_ What’s the server-side story? Should I compile to native or to JS and use node.js?

We do compile to native, but the native workflow is currently work-in-progress. At this time, we recommend compiling to JS through BuckleScript and use the JS wrappers.

_ How is the Learning Cure?

It is quite high at first but it gets better over time and specially for larger teams is easier.

_ Does Community support it?

We all know that best technologies do not last if community doesn't support them and this is one of the major issues of ReasonML.

There are less than 200 questions in StackOverflow — Link

Google Trends shows really low number of searches

Conclusion

Of course there are advantages to typed languages, but in terms of productivity, using whatever that makes developers happier makes more sense. However, not having a major of community on Reason ML makes it harder to choose despite all of the advantages of using it.

ReasonML might be part of your App, or even small projects but moving the whole project to ReasonML does not look like a best option.

Knowing strength and weaknesses of a language that you are using is an essential knowledge to have.

Got experience with Reason? Share it with me!

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