Battle of the OCaml plugins for Eclipse

A new OCaml plugin for Eclipse, called OcaIDE, has just been announced. Apparently, it has been under development for a long time. It seems to be quite complete in features, although I didn't try it yet. The question is that this is the third OCaml plugin being developed currently; there's ODT, about which I talked in a earlier post, and another one being developed as one of the OCaml projects in the Google Summer of Code. The competition is good in some ways, but on the other hand the resulting fragmentation can be a problem to a small community like that of OCaml. It would be best if the teams managed to combine their efforts in some way. Let's see how this plays out.

Speaking of collaboration, there's mention on OcaIDE's site about a free-software license, but the source code doesn't seem to be available.

UPDATE: As someone pointed in the comments, the source is available together with the plugin. See here.

OCaml with Eclipse

The primary editor on which to write OCaml code has always been Emacs. This tends to be a problem for users on Windows, that mostly aren't familiar with the editor. And of course there are many people that use unix platforms and don't like Emacs.

A good alternative is Eclipse, which has very good plugins for Java programming, and can be extended to handle other languages. ODT, a plugin for OCaml development in Eclipse, is being actively developed by Emmanuel Dieul. Actually there's another plugin in development by someone under the Google Summer of Code, and we hope they can integrate both efforts to get a better plugin in the end.

Anyway, ODT looks interesting right now, and it's been evolving quite fast. Eclipse is quite a memory hog, but if you already use it or are willing to pay the requirements, it can provide a modern IDE for OCaml under Windows or unix, and a good alternative for Emacs. Let's hope ODT keeps improving.