[hutao]

Over the past few years, OCaml has seen an abundance of new language features and standard library additions. OCaml 4.08 added let-binding operators (syntactic sugar for continuation-passing style and monadic programming), OCaml 5 implemented a multicore runtime and effect handlers, OCaml 5.3 finally added dynamic arrays to the standard library, and OCaml 5.4 added labeled tuples.

With unboxed types, I believe OCaml would achieve similar granularity over memory allocations as C#: garbage-collected, but supporting "structs" which are allocated on the stack (or inline the same heap allocation when part of a reference type). I think there is an unexplored space for "soft" systems programming languages that retain a garbage collector by default, while also allowing the programmer to tightly control memory allocations in performance-critical code.

If OCaml hits this sweet spot in abstraction, what domains would adopt it? Could OCaml potentially compete with C#, or Swift?

[pjmlp]

OCaml already has that spot for quite some time, the problem is more cultural than technical.

Back in my day we would consider writing compiler toolchains systems programming as well.

"Unix system programming in OCaml", originally published in 1991, latest update 2014.

https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/