Anyone have more information on a likely time-line for multicore? It feels like it's been comming for a long time. I suppose it's encouraging that some work is released in the mainline compiler though.
Behind the scenes there's a lot of work happening. Retrofitting parallelism to an existing runtime while maintaining compatibility with existing code and keeping the kind of performance users are used to is difficult.
There will be a lot more information out in the next month or two about how it all works, which should coincide with getting more of it upstream.
I don't speak for OCaml or OCaml Labs but am a contributor to multicore if people have specific questions, I can try to answer them.
I'm learning Rust and I'm doing so a bit begrudgingly at times. I like OCaml better but the lack of frictionless parallelism is a huge letdown. (And I don't think spawning several processes is an actual alternative, no.)
Trust me, there is some amount of programmers out there who will very quickly adopt OCaml after it gains multicore abilities. They are eagerly awaiting and watching. And I'm one of them.
Mostly the work is slowly getting it upstream in a way that doesn't break existing code. (There are some changes which affect C extensions, although the changes so far have only had a very minor impact, things like fixing const-correctness).