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Frustrations with the OCaml ecosystem while developing a synthesizer library

developing a Synthesizer Library This post is about some frustrating experiences I had while developing my first non-trivial OCaml project - an audio synthesizer library. I generally enjoy programming in OCaml but I often find its development tools to be counter-intuitive in their UX and surprising-in-a-bad-way in their behaviour.

I used ocaml-rs and cpal to make a small Rust library named low_level which accepts a stream of float s representing audio data, and plays them on the computer’s speakers. Most of the negative experiences from this post happened when I strayed from the Happy Path into parts of the ecosystem that are less polished and battle tested, or when my assumptions ran contrary to those made by tools. Normalize complaining about this stuff so that new OCaml users can correctly set their expectations coming in and don’t get a nasty shock the first time they leave the Happy Path.

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