code compatibility between OCaml and F#

Good day all,

I am developing a small hobby project in OCaml. I was wondering how easy it would be to migrate it to F#. I know that F# has some features that OCaml doesn't, but I was hoping that my OCaml code would require little effort to port. I don't nec开发者_运维问答essarily want to migrate, I want to retain / develop on both platforms.

Thanks in advance, Michael

Writing cross-compiling code looks like a world of pain to me. John Whitington of Coherent PDF is the only person I know of who has tried to do this to any real degree.

I have translated a lot of OCaml code to F# (probably more than anyone else in the world) and the main problems are #light syntax, the use of any non-trivial OCaml features (objects, polymorphic variants, higher-order modules, labelled and optional arguments and so on), libraries (e.g. lablgl, lablgtk, ocamlgraph, laziness), macros (parsing, streams, pattern matching extensions) and changes in basic syntax such as array indexing. For example, I just tried to port the Almabench benchmark from OCaml to F# and it took several hours because I ended up by having to rewrite every a.[i] to an a.(i) by hand due to a multitude of bugs in the F# compiler: its OCaml compatibility mode is quite fragile.

So I would advise you to choose between the languages rather than trying to cross-compile.

You should read the final portion of the spec

Features for ML Compatibility

and be sure to grab FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll from the PowerPack for various compat libraries.

I haven't done any OCaml to F#-porting, but I know F# has been designed with OCaml compatibility in mind. As I know, F# is mostly a superset of basic OCaml.

It should support (and without #light be limited to) most OCaml keywords and have equivalents of most standard functions in the core libraries (or in the .Net framework). So I'd guess that - at least for hobby projects - porting should be actually easy.

F# doesn't have OCaml's advanced module system though, so you'll have trouble with implementing e.g. functors.