Yes, that can be super confusing initially. When I first started OCaml it took me a good while to figure out that there are essentially two "dialects" – stdlib and Jane Street. JS did a lot to popularise the language in recent years, and @yminsky.bsky.social et al's "Real World OCaml" is excellent.

Since you write a ton of OCaml, do you recommend us new learners stick to stdlib too?

I recently ran into this as well. It is a bit confusing to have multiple stdlibs but from what I gathered in my reading, mane seem to use core from Jane street too. I’ve started using that for my learning and it’s going well so far. It’s very feature rich!

I wonder the same. It would be nice to have a general debug print or something that you could pipe into and it would also return the what was passed into it so you could debug intermediate steps.

Most definitely! The type inference is really amazing so it still feels very ergonomic to write. I doubt the cli will go far but it’s a great learning exercise. I may post here if I make some more progress!