On OCaml and the JS platform

ReScript, née BuckleScript, is a state-of-the-art compiler that used to target OCaml (and Reason), but is fast moving away from its parent language. OCaml compatibility is high on my list of desirable features, and I've been disillusioned with the direction the project has veered into. So I took matters into my own hands. Read on!

What ReScript looks like today

The BuckleScript project started out as an OCaml to JavaScript compiler. Last year, after a surprising announcement and discussions that I'll choose not to rehash in this space, ReScript has made it clear that they'll be pursuing a new direction for the project, which includes:

• Not supporting newer versions of Reason

• Dropping support for OCaml features that are not deemed necessary for the success of ReScript

  • An example is the recent move to really break away from OCaml by removing support for the OCaml object system (it's even removed from the OCaml compiler in ReScript "mode" )
• Dropping support for custom PPXes such as ppx_deriving (the deriving attribute is now exclusively interpreted as bs.deriving)
• Focusing almost excusively on the "ReScript syntax", which lacks many common features present in OCaml (e.g. custom infix operators, weird syntax for lists, and others)
• not staying up-to-date with the OCaml release cycle (source)

So, what have I been up to?

I mentioned above that the direction of ReScript doesn't align with my personal use cases. Specifically, I'm interested in as much compatibility as possible with the OCaml ecosystem (after all, BuckleScript stands on the shoulders of giants), and the possibility of sharing code with native OCaml projects — this is extremely useful for sharing types and common business logic, and I use it in all my projects.

BuckleScript on OCaml 4.12

I've been maintaining my own fork of BuckleScript since the summer 2020. A few days ago, I started exploring bumping the OCaml version. And you know what? Turns out updating the compiler version isn't hard at all (it only took 3 days!).

The end result is a state of the art compiler for the JavaScript platform (preserving all features of BuckleScript), that diverges from upstream in the following ways:

• uses Dune as the build tool instead of (a very custom, patched, outdated version of) ninja

  • Dune is used to build both the compiler and to build JS projects

• most tooling in the OCaml ecosystem just works (PPXes too!)

  • this is especially important as ocaml-lsp is dropping support for OCaml 4.06 soon.
• Reason is bundled as a library inside the compiler, instead of shelling out to refmt, which always made reason slower than it had to be in BuckleScript ^₁.
• we get all the cool enhancements made to OCaml in recent history for free, including letop bindings and many new and improved standard library modules.
• supports monorepos trivially, without the need for features like "pinned dependencies" ^₂

Looking onwards

What does the future look like? I'm not sure. I built something that is useful to me, and I'm planning on maintaining it for my own use cases. If more folks are interested, there are some really interesting things that this could unlock:

• deeper dune integration (perhaps in Dune itself, if this project ends up being adopted)
• move away from an ad-hoc bsconfig.json way of specifying configuration, towards something more established in the OCaml community
• support for consuming OPAM packages directly (this is possible with some heavy lifting in userspace today)
• eventually release and distribute to OPAM as well

Feedback

If any of this sounds useful to you, I'd love for you to reach out to me. I think there's a opportunity here to make something really great that has the best of both worlds: our favorite OCaml on the world's most popular platform.

The project lives here. At the time of this writing, you need nix to get the correct packages in order to build the project. This limitation can be lifted as soon as folks are interested in trying out the project.

Please send me a message on Twitter @_anmonteiro, or otherwise catch me on the OCaml / Reason Discord servers.

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!

Addendum: The initial version of this post failed to acknowledge the BuckleScript authors. Even though I fixed that right away in tweet form, I took a suggestion from a Twitter reply and added here for posterity.

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