[steeleduncan]

Ocaml to this day has issues on Windows. Its a phenomenal tool, but adoption is always going to be hampered while the world's dominant desktop OS is a second class citizen for that tool.

[pjmlp]

Just like most languages that are UNIX first, like Rust.

[steeleduncan]

No, not really. Rust undoubtedly started on *nix, but all Tier 1 platforms are supported equally[1]. To quote from OCaml's main site[2] A gentle reminder that if you do not need Windows binaries, then a more stable option is to use WSL2, ie when on Windows it is better to use OCaml from within a Linux VM.

Ocaml is great, but its Windows support sucks, and that makes adoption hard in a lot of contexts.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/platform-support.html

[2] https://www.ocaml.org/docs/ocaml-on-windows

[pjmlp]

Any language that calls themselves systems programming language, on Windows, must have first class support for COM and WinRT, in their various workloads.

Rust support for them is pretty much WIP.

And then there is the whole matter that Windows shops love to ship binary libraries.

[steeleduncan]

There has been a Microsoft supported Rust projection of WinRT for a few years now [1].

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

[pjmlp]

Now go try to write a UWP app with it, or a COM library to be consumed by .NET in MTA mode.

Why do you think I mentioned WIP?

The competition bare minimum is MFC, ATL, WRL, including Visual Studio tooling.

[nerdponx]

What languages/platforms do meet this criterion? .NET, C, C++, Python? I know pretty much nothing about Windows system programming, but I wouldn't be surprised if most programming languages really are "Unix first".

[pjmlp]

.NET languages, C++ and Delphi are the elephant in the room regarding Windows.