16:06 <discocaml> <xavierm02_> Is there a theme for odoc / odig that indents includes?

20:35 <terri66> what is ocaml used for?

20:35 <terri66> do you guys use it professional?

20:37 <terri66> I mean is there some field where ocaml is powerful language? Which kind of companies are looking for ocaml developer?

20:41 <discocaml> <uberpyro181> ocaml is general purpose and niche

20:42 <terri66> What niche?

20:42 <discocaml> <uberpyro181> it's good for a number of applications, in particular i really like it for compilers and interpreters

20:42 <discocaml> <uberpyro181> however because it's so niche, there isn't considerable use in industry

20:42 <discocaml> <uberpyro181> and probably a lot of ocamling is hobby

20:42 <discocaml> <uberpyro181> the most notable company that does use ocaml is probably jane street, which is a fintech company

20:43 <discocaml> <uberpyro181> by "niche" i really meant that it's a small community and shared by people who like fp, more than in terms of its application

20:47 <octachron> Meta has few compilers/static analyzers written in OCaml (hack, flow, pyre on top of my head)

20:48 <terri66> Why in OCaml? Is there any feature in which ocaml outperforms the competition?

20:49 <octachron> There is also Ahref which has a sizeable OCaml codebase

20:49 <octachron> Modularity, an expressive type system, serious support for separate compilation.

20:50 <octachron> Good enough and reliable performance for a GC language.

20:50 <discocaml> <Kali> ocaml has a mature toolset which includes parser/lexer generator, a fast compiler, fast executables, and is garbage-collected (no manual memory management needed)

20:50 <octachron> (See for https://ocaml.org for a more complete list of company using OCaml in a noteworthy way)

20:51 <discocaml> <Kali> ocaml is also not a *pure* functional language, which makes it less intimidating for people to pick up who haven't programmed in a functional language before

20:52 <companion_cube> terri66: simply, imho: OCaml is very expressive when it comes to the kind of algorithms involved in compilers and similar programs (with syntax trees)

20:52 <companion_cube> it's also relatively simple, fast, and compiles quickly

20:54 <discocaml> <Kali> ocaml is also very expressive in general, especially compared to something like haskell which has a lot of things implied with whitespace

20:54 <discocaml> <Kali> or special symbols

20:55 <octachron> A niche language is a probably bit too restrictive, I would rather qualify OCaml as a minority language: it is not used everywhere far from it but you can find uses of OCaml in a number industrial or academic settings.