[Icathian]

Ocaml is absolutely playing in similar spaces as rust. I see the tradeoff there as one of runtime performance (Rust) against less syntax / dev effort (Ocaml). If you don't need your code to go fast, Ocaml is probably just fine for you to use. Hell, Jane Street famously does so and has talked in great detail on their podcast and in articles about the many strengths and tradeoffs involved here.

[vegai_]

Given how many startups work with python, which is notoriously slow, this is a somewhat ridiculous statement. Ocaml's performance is probably 50ish% of Rust's at worst, which I claim is more than enough for 99% of the problems out there.

Rust's popularity, again I claim, has almost nothing to with its performance. It's more about the much more modern tooling, relatively simplified language (for most parts, though obviously not all) and superior marketing.

[giraffe_lady]

It's more like "if you need your code to go extremely fast" though, which is honestly pretty rare in my experience. Ocaml is no slouch and people regularly build great products on much slower languages and that's rarely the limiting factor.