[ajshankar]

The number one problem with commercial OCaml is the lack of comprehensive library support. Until that's addressed, it's not going to take off. Brilliant language, not very practical. F# is a step in the right direction here.

[kia]

While F# is a great language, its main problem is that it is basically MS only. At the current stage of development mono lags behind official MS .net implementation too much in terms of performance/stability/features.

[praptak]

Also, last time I checked only some parts of what mono implements are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise (i.e. promise not to sue you over it.) If there's anything new on this front, please share.

[raphscallion]

What about Jane Street's Core (http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13), or Batteries Included (http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/) ?

[Yoric]

Go Batteries Included! (yes, I'm one of the developers, did that show? :))

[plastics]

The last time I tried installing Batteries (on OS X) it was a big PITA and it looked like it was dead in the water (this was about 18 months ago).

During the same time using GODI to install a xml processing library completely hosed my system after me foolishly granting it root rights, which killed my OCaml enthusiasm for good.

OCaml is in itself a really nice language (apart from some warts like lack of native multithreading support) but it's tooling, infrastructure and "first developer experience" and lack of progress in these areas in the last years is beyond atrocious (compared to F#, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby, Python, JavaScript).