The cozy web relies on "(human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams", hopefully one day changing "from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable, interlinked clips"
Almost all modern statically typed languages have closures, higher-order functions/methods, lazy streams, and combinators that run efficiently. Persistent/immutable data structures can be implemented even in C.
Also, OCaml has no tracking of side-effects (like in Haskell), and the language and the standard library have lots of features and functions with mutation, such as the array update syntax, mutable record fields, Hashtbl, and the regex module.
The only thing that makes OCaml more “functional” than e.g. Dart, Java, or Rust is that it supports tail calls. While having tail calls is important for functional programming, I would happily give up on tail calls if that means not having the problems listed above.
When you mix imperative and functional styles tail calls become less important. For example, I don’t have to implement a stream map function in Dart with a tail call to map the rest of the stream, I can just use a while or for loop.
In my opinion there is no reason to use OCaml in a new project in 2023.
Creating a custom engine is a big endeavour and not many are ready for that. I recognize Unity (and Unreal to less extent) have really democratized video game development. Lots of small-medium size companies can use Unity today to develop games quickly, and sometimes, with very low budgets! But, still, lots of big companies prefer to rely on their own custom technologies.
I feel that people today overestimate how difficult it is to create a game engine, or maybe they underestimate the other aspects of game development.
For clarity, I mean here a basic engine (for example, a custom engine for a 2D game), not a photorealistic and generic 3D game engine like Unity (that definitely is very difficult and probably not worth reinventing the wheel without a good reason).
I am glad to see the Gravity SUV moving forward so quickly in its development, as it builds upon everything this organization has achieved so far and moves forward the advancements of their in-house tech to make a luxury electric SUV like no one else.
Twitter has the advantage of huge entrenchment of many communities for a lot of use cases, and a lack of good competitors. I do not believe that a decentralized alternative is likely to take their place.
here's something I use (more simpler than installing those numerous extensions and bloating your browser) for making youtube less distracting and more productive:
less addictive youtube: https://github.com/AlexisDrain/Less-Addictive-YouTube