Re: Ocaml applications

trying some answers, see inline

On 14.04.2016 05:55, [email protected] [ocaml_beginners] wrote:
>  
>
> Hello,
>
> I am new to Ocaml and thinking of learning.
>
Congratulations. OCaml is one of the big sources for feature inspiration these times.
>
> What are typical use cases of Ocaml ? What kind of applications Ocaml fits in ?
>
see http://ocaml.org/learn/success.html.

To be honest OCaml is more a niche language, but with unique features, so
it will be used in many kinds of applications, by people who have special knowlegde
and expertise in informatics.

It's origins are in mathematics and logic, so a big special application is computer
aided correctness proofs (formal methods).
>
> I read that its quite fast(possibly as Java) .
>
It has compact byte code, it can be run as a script, and it can be compiled to native
code needing only the system libc.

And yes, it can be fast. If being fast were the main consideration, Ruby would never
have seen more than a bunch of users.
>
> Does it fit in developing network servers ? How matured  Ocaml libraries are in
> developing socket/network  based applications ? 
>
Read about https://mirage.io/ MirageOS: writing a minimal operating system running
directly on Xen and hosting your application.
>
> May be foolish question- Does Ocaml make native C call  for writing to say Socket
> or File ?
>
It uses libc which is recommended on *nix systems because it abstracts away many
details of the binary API.

To be precise "native C call" should rather be "native library call", unix .so
libraries are compiled to machine code
and can be called by any other machine code respecting the calling conventions.

Other platforms: on MS Windows there is F#, which is a .NET offspring of OCaml.

/Str.