Learning OCaml, for C, C++, Perl and Java programmers [LWN.net]

Richard Jones has put together a tutorial for learning OCaml. "This is a practical, detailed tutorial for people who already know an imperative or OO-language and wish to learn OCaml."

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As fast as C, as high level as Perl

Posted Jun 24, 2003 7:44 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

That's an over-simplification (in many ways OCaml is higher level than Perl), but for people who've been writing large Perl applications and struggling to get really good performance, particularly in CGI without mod_perl, it's well worth having a look at OCaml. It's a very high level language that can be compiled to machine code that really can be as fast as C (due to clever optimisations), yet can also be interpreted for ease of development. It also has good OO support for Python and Java aficionados.

This is a really good tutorial. For some general links, including links on performance and ease of programming benchmarks against various languages including C and Perl, see my OCaml page.