Were bs.deriving(jsConverter) and bs.deriving(abstract) removed?

The whole story around ppx is quite demotivating. Some time ago, I finished transition of my ppx’es to ppxlib which was non-trivial and time consuming. Converting back ppx’es that heavily rely on extension points provided by ppxlib to anything else will be even more time consuming and I just don’t see myself going through this again tbh.

For people who are reading the thread, it’s really not easy work to manage a community

I’ve been around for awhile, I truly appreciate all the work that’s been done so far and I do as much as I can to push ReScript in the projects I’m involved in. But repetitive statements like this is a big red flag that indicates that communication is badly broken. From my point of view, this is the very first thing that needs to be fixed if having a healthy community is a priority.

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We should probably fork this into a different thread. Ppx has always been an informally supported thing in ReScript and it’s time to document this a bit more clearly to avoid some expectation mismatches.

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I know time is short and OSS is hard but at least a roadmap draft with a couple bullet points with the upcoming breaking changes or a forum post when they are released would be much appreciated.
We are all very supportive of ReScript but I just keep seeing lib authors being treated very harshly for no reason. It seems like ReScript is saying over and over that the previous ReasonML community and even the one that supported the transition is not welcome at all in this new paradigm shift. We’ll eventually listen.

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Hey Gabriel, we’ve promoted these wherever we can:

Additionally there’s also been various private reach outs with people regarding breakages including this one, whenever doable.

More generally, we also maintained a roadmap on the compiler repo’s wiki and then shifted to announcing them on the forum for more eyes. Not to mention several standalone threads: 1 2 3 4, including various calls for testing.

This specific issue also wasn’t 100% a breakage from our side, considering we maintained that namespacing until now, and considering that we don’t have control over many of the technical architectures above which we’ve discouraged (but will discourage even more prominently). However you know discouragement isn’t enough; we have to provide a better alternative. Given your and others’ experience with ppx, you can imagine how long that takes. Seems like we need to re-prioritize this.

Paradigm shift means it’s not the same paradigm, and thus usually not same set of people either. Reason kept the native flavor and a more OCaml-oriented mindset. This has been described extensively in the rebranding blog post and whenever we get to yak shave a bit on the forum. See my comment history.

We were bound to lose some folks but even so, we did try keeping the old community intact. The most we’ve done was last week when after eight months, we archived the 3 rescript channels out of ~20 in Reason’s dedicated Discord (with an announcement, and without destroying existing message history); meanwhile the entire Reason forum has been left alone while I continue to pay the hosting cost out of my pocket.

I don’t wanna point finger but: the rebranding split was an agreed upon decision by all the leaders (not the community definitely, but at least the leaders). We’ve been managing our side. Where did the other side’s leader(s) go when we needed Reason-related engineering support during this transition? We had our engineering mishaps over this year, but it seems all the mishaps are handled by the ReScript side? And how come Patrick and I were the only ones cleaning up the Reason side of the docs? And why am I the only active admin on the Reason forum?

There might be a certain perception bias here.

Anyway, as the maintainer of the rescript-lang Twitter account, I’ve also seen and acknowledge your positive involvement in the ReScript community (as opposed to a lip service “we’re all very supportive of ReScript” said by a few recent folks with an entirely different agenda, so thank you for staying real). However, our recent surveys, private talks and forum stats also indicated to us that we’ve been going the right direction despite some flaws, where said flaws include vanishingly few “no announcement” over the last year. I’d like to suggest that it’s possible that you’ve repeatedly hit some pathological use-case along with a same group of people, which requires further diagnosis in a different thread.

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@Hongbo @chenglou, your project is awesome. I love watching you all work. You all are not the greatest communicators but you can’t be good at everything and you certainly make the time when things get crazy. And with all the moving parts of developing a language, wow. Thanks for all you do. I genuinely look forward to see where you take us. I wish I new this compiler stuff enough to help you. Sorry you didnt get as much help as you could have used during the transition.

I can take over the discord server cost if you wanted to move on from it as it moves away from what you are doing.

Please do DM me.

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I love all the positive stuff that is happening in the rescript ecosystem. And I am really thankful for that. I also agree that Reason has been in limbo a little with no clear leadership. In that area rescript clearly does a lot better at the moment.

We should respect the choices that the leaders like @chenglou are making. In most cases, it’s better to make a decision and rally behind that than no progress being made.

We should also be mindful that some people might be going through a rough patch, or have a bad day, and be decent ourselves. At least that’s what I am trying to do. This is a great community and let’s keep it this way!

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