[mwcampbell]

Simple translation to the native code of your target environment is a feature in itself, especially when you have to debug. I suppose if you can write everything in Haskell and never have to interact directly with your runtime environment (be it native or a browser), you could treat Haskell itself as a bedrock abstraction (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55). But in many real projects, you do have to work directly with the underlying environment. In that case, the bedrock abstraction is the machine itself (or, for a browser-based app, the JavaScript runtime). So closeness to the machine is a desirable feature in a language and its compiler, to be balanced with other things like developer productivity (so C with manual memory management is the wrong choice for a lot of applications). That's why, if OCaml is simpler to translate to native code or JS than Haskell, I think I'd prefer OCaml.