On: A deep dive into Multicore OCaml garbage collector

[arthurbrown]

The community tends to shy away from classes, but using a method for to_string accomplishes your second point in a minimal way.

  let to_string stringer : string = stringer#to_string
  val to_string : < to_string : string; .. > -> string = <fun>

I think there's also plenty of people who feel just as strongly about Reason syntax in the other direction.

[mercurial → arthurbrown]

I'm not particularly attached to Reason syntax myself, but there are some bits of OCaml syntax that do annoy me, such as the right-to-left direction for parametrized types ('a list instead of a more usual list 'a).

As for classes, well... They're not really used outside of specific situations (eg, UI widgets), so it's not really a terribly convenient solution (especially since, for a really useful to_string implementation, you would want the member fields of your class to also implement to_string, so that would mean objects everywhere).