Reason describes itself as "a meta language toolchain to build systems rapidly", which seems a little vague to me. Am I understanding correctly that Reason is both a (kind of) alternative compiler for OCaml's build toolchain, and a dialect of OCaml in its own right?
To tie this back to Bucklescript, does this loosely describe the process of using Reason syntax to author Javascript? Reason file -> (Reason) -> OCaml executable code -> (Bucklescript) -> Javascript
Basically, just a new syntax and a blessed-stack approach that really, really emphasizes developer experience. Which is to say, ReasonML is merely a cosmetic and DX change, it remains compatible and is not a fork of OCaml at all.
There's a crucial distinction! OCaml's compilation command takes in a `-pp` flag (preprocessor), which accepts a command that takes in a file and outputs an OCaml AST tree. We're basically using that. In that sense, the official OCaml syntax is really just that: another syntax like Reason, but official, and goes back two decades.
To tie this back to Bucklescript, does this loosely describe the process of using Reason syntax to author Javascript? Reason file -> (Reason) -> OCaml executable code -> (Bucklescript) -> Javascript