Hi, > It seems like batteries' adoption isn't quite as thorough as expected. > We in the batteries devel team would love to know why you don't use > batteries. Here's some of our guesses:
Batteries is a great project, and you guys shouldn't feel discouraged if it doesn't take over the world overnight. There's unfamiliarity and inertia to overcome, and that takes time. Personally, I've installed Batteries and played with it, but I'm not using it (yet) on my projects. Going back to your list, here's why: > 2) It's not 1.0 yet, I'll try it then That's indeed a factor. > 3) It makes my executables too big This used to be a bigger problem. Previous versions of Batteries would pack everything into a module, disabling the linker's ability to link only effectively used code. Thankfully newer versions are going towards a flatter hierarchy. > 4) It's too hard to install (dependencies, godi failures) Never ran into this problem. > 5) It's difficult to compile against Not an issue. > 6) It doesn't work on my platform Not an issue. > 7) It uses camlp4 Not an issue for me. There's this thing called a "build system" that should handle all that transparently, so I couldn't care less if it required carrier pigeons to compile my programs. But yes, I admit it may be an issue for more constrained platforms. > 8) Other (please explain) a) Lack of exposure to the advantages of Batteries. It borrows lots of cool ideas from Haskell, but that may not be immediately apparent. You guys should take advantage of the Ocaml Planet to run a publicity campaign: you can make a number of tutorial posts showing the "old" way versus the Batteries way. There's more to Batteries than just a collection of APIs, and that message may not be getting through. b) I'm already using Extlib extensively, and that reduces the advantage for Batteries. (Same way the Minitel slowed down Internet adoption in France in the mid-nineties?) Best regards, Dario Teixeira _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
