Hi Mafinar, I would recommend my post to get started: Practical OCaml - DEV Community . It walks through setting up with a few common libraries.
I don’t actually include Jane Street’s Core/Base because I usually don’t reach for them. That’s one of the, in my opinion, issues with Real World OCaml: it very heavily relies on and presents Core as ‘the alternative standard library that everyone should use’ when in reality it’s a very heavyweight dependency that usually only large applications can justify. It’s also not ported to Windows (same with Jane Street’s Async, which is why I recommend Lwt for concurrency).
I think it’s a good idea to start with the libraries that are shipped with OCaml:
- core library (note, not Jane Street Core), this lists the built-in types and exceptions of the language
-
standard library (Stdlib), this provides a lot of functionality, especially in recent OCaml versions. Especially important: List, String, Set, Map, Hashtbl, Printf. Also look into Sys (e.g.
Sys.getenv) and Filename (file name operations, portable directory separator, etc.) - unix library (Unix system calls), the name is a slight misnomer as it also (mostly) works on Windows.
So that leaves the final note–instead of Real World OCaml, I would actually recommend Cornell’s Functional Programming in OCaml, which is based on their lecture notes for their course, with a long history of teaching OCaml (and doesn’t rely on any alternative standard libraries).
By the way, I am enjoying this thread a lot and will be happy to jump in as well if any questions 