[mhd]

The old ML compilers were more deeply rooted in academia. It was almost popular to write a new one to fiddle with a new idea (like concurrency). Performance and more pragmatic considerations were a bit secondary and that included OS interfaces.

Caml had these, and thus was used to build some software somewhat popular on Unix systems (e.g. Unison, MLDonkey, a flash compiler). And while these days it might seem like we've got plenty of freely available, fast compiling, native languages to choose from, just a few years the situation was very different. So some just chose the language for that reason, never mind syntax or semantics. As long as it wasn't C.

So you just got the feeling of more dedicated, pragmatic language maintainers and actual community use. People who really care about purism went over to Haskelly anyway.

(Personally, I like the idea of languages with more than one compiler, if only the "Standard" part of "SML" would be a bit bigger)

[agumonkey]

I wonder if the Objective part of it made it more lively in the mainstream eyes too instead of "stagnant/crude" sml.

[mhd]

As far as I can remember, those were almost deprecated even way back when. It's never been much used for GUIs anyway, and I believe most servers and compilers were mostly written in a functional fashion.

[agumonkey]

Mystery stays intact.