Your perspective on the project is exactly how we think about it: Melange provides the tooling for fullstack (@davesnx likes to call them Universal) Reason/OCaml applications.
I suspect my time in Clojure(Script) has heavily influenced how I look at a "Language of the System"[1], and that's effectively what we're trying to do here.
Re: ReasonML, I very much understand the sentiment. In my mind right now, ReasonML is only there to provide JSX and reason-react support. I suspect we'll eventually write a JSX PPX for OCaml and stop using ReasonML down the road (fairly longer term).
Thanks for Melange! I fully believe in the mission, backing, and philosophy of Melange over ReScript.
To add a counterpoint, though I'm in the minority, I think ReasonML is really really important to keep OCaml accessible to a larger amount of people. I work in a very cross-platform context and program in 5/6 different languages a month, and despite having a lot of experience with different syntaxes, OCaml is just weirdly unique enough that it's hard to immediately transfer my skills. I haven't written OCaml seriously in a while, and even looking back on my own code, for example the PPX I wrote https://github.com/AriaFallah/ppx_str 5 years ago, I can't really read it without zoning in and thinking quite hard vs. just flowing.
You also make a good point. I didn't go into too much detail about ReasonML in another comment, but I know Jordan (@jordwalke) has plans for a ReasonML v4 [1] with slight syntax improvements. I don't currently know the status of that work, however, but I think we'll want to make progress soon.
So the TL;DR is more that ReasonML is not going anywhere, especially since Ahrefs have a huge ReasonML frontend codebase [2].
Your perspective on the project is exactly how we think about it: Melange provides the tooling for fullstack (@davesnx likes to call them Universal) Reason/OCaml applications.
I suspect my time in Clojure(Script) has heavily influenced how I look at a "Language of the System"[1], and that's effectively what we're trying to do here.
Re: ReasonML, I very much understand the sentiment. In my mind right now, ReasonML is only there to provide JSX and reason-react support. I suspect we'll eventually write a JSX PPX for OCaml and stop using ReasonML down the road (fairly longer term).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU