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StandardML implementations have had good multicore support for decades now despite having only a tiny fraction of the users and development time. Meanwhile, Ocaml has been promising support for years.

What in Ocaml makes this so much harder to implement?

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OCaml (or its immediate predecessor[1]) had a multicore implementation, but it was dropped because of its complexity and effect on single-thread performance. The challenge is to add it back in a way that is maintainable and doesn't negatively affect current users.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2774662_Concurrent_...

As the sibling comment mentions, the hard part is actually retrofitting multicore whilst maintaining compatibility _and_ performance.

Our paper last year covers most of why this is tricky: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.11663

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