Is OCaml a pure functional language?

Is OCaml a pure functional language?

ML-derived languages like OCaml are “mostly pure”. They allow side-effects through things like references and arrays, but by and large most of the code you’ll write will be pure functional because they encourage this thinking. Haskell, another functional language, is pure functional.

Is OCaml similar to Haskell?

If Haskell is a niche language, then OCaml is a super-niche language. The OCaml community is much smaller. Where Haskell is doing more-or-less fine with libraries, OCaml has significantly less to propose. There are some nice libraries in OCaml, but in many areas the situation is not perfect.

Is OCaml a functional?

OCaml is a functional programming language. The key linguistic abstraction of functional languages is the mathematical function. A function maps an input to an output; for the same input, it always produces the same output.

Do people still use OCaml?

OCaml in particular can be used anywhere that C is traditionally used, such as for embedded devices, graphics drivers, operating systems, etc. By all rights, OCaml should have taken over the world by now, but hardly anyone heard of the language yet alone used it.

What makes OCaml so special?

What makes OCaml special is that it occupies a sweet spot in programming language design.It provides a combination of efficiency, expressiveness, and practicality that is matched by no other language. That is in large part because OCaml is an elegant combination of language features that have been developed over the last 40 years.

How to install OCaml compiler?

OPAM is the package manager for OCaml. It is the recommended way to install the OCaml compiler and OCaml packages. Simply follow the OPAM install instructions. Then, use opam to install an ocaml compiler.

How fast is OCaml compared to C?

Xavier Leroy has stated that “OCaml delivers at least 50% of the performance of a decent C compiler”, although a direct comparison is impossible. Some functions in the OCaml standard library are implemented with faster algorithms than equivalent functions in the standard libraries of other languages.

Does Opam work with main OCaml?

Main OCaml versions and OPAM work. The disadvantage of this method is that you don’t build native Windows binaries but Linux binaries. The OCaml source distribution directly supports many different Windows ports.