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please see my answers inline
/Str.
On 11.05.2015 07:15, [email protected] [ocaml_beginners] wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> These questions might have been asked many times.I planning to learn Ocaml.
>
> 1)What are typical use cases Ocaml excels at ? I came to know its used mainly in
> scientific programming.
>
Warning: there might be some opinion or personal perception here.
First: OCaml is pretty much a general purpose language. Though not soo popular in
this role, you can look at F#, which is a originally ML/OCaml based Microsoft
language for .Net, and which has caused some hype on the dotnet platform and amongst
MS application programmers.
Then it excels in systems programming: the Xen hypervisor is written in OCaml I
think, and work in this direction goes on with Mirage (www.openmirage.org/) which
will provide OS services for applications that run on Xen (one might say a container
on steroids).
Do not forget the big banking and trading applications at janestreet.com (skipping
the typo 'big bang king applications').
And last, but topmost, is the application as language for formal proofs, see
coq.inria.fr. which is now THE BIG THING in informatics trying to prove the
correctness of systems. Once they get this to work and be practical there will be no
more hourly updates for your security sensitive OS and applications (and maybe no
more of the terribly insecure C programming). I won't miss either.
And one word to your interest in OCaml: the ML / Ocaml languages are at the moment
the primary source of inspiration for new language development, see for example Rust
and pattern matching.
> 2)How is performance of Ocaml compared with C++,Java,Erlang ? I am not asking
> benchmark figures but in general.
>
As a bytecode application OCaml is in the top group of scripting languages, compiled
to machine code it is just a bit behind the top players.
>
> Regards
>
> PK
>
>
>