Elegant Dependency Injection in OCaml: An Object-Oriented Approach
This article explores different approaches to dependency injection in OCaml and proposes a novel object-oriented solution. The author contrasts the shortcomings of existing methods using user-defined effects and modules as first-class values, arguing they are overly verbose and prone to errors in real-world applications. The new approach leverages OCaml's powerful object model, utilizing features like structural object types and row variables to achieve type-safe dependency injection with easy composition and extension. The article demonstrates the elegance and maintainability of this method through simple and more complex examples, comparing it to other approaches and ultimately recommending the object-oriented method for straightforward dependency injection scenarios.