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Comment by sporkl | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I feel like OCaml is growing in popularity, probably due to ecosystem improvements. Stuff like dune and other OCaml Platform tools becoming mature, multicore support, recently first-class Windows support, etc.

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I also suspect that people are more open to a language like OCaml. With Rust and javascript being so popular, a lot of constructs in OCaml will not seem so foreign.

OCaml is in many ways a sane Typescript or a functional version of Go.

Ditto, it feels like more people are coming around to the ML style type systems. I'm hoping Gleam will fill the void with a scalable BEAM backend and compiling to JS with Lustre on the frontend (or even just serverside with htmx).

Having known OCaml since Caml Light days, Go's type system has nothing to do with OCaml, it is exactly the kind of languages the Go community rants about.

Yeah I don't think the Go community would like OCaml very much. But I do think there are some similarities, in that they both have great compile times, as a functional language OCaml is quite simple, they are both GC'd systems languages and both have predictable runtimes. So if you appreciate a lot of ideas in Go, but find them too conservative and the error handling too tedious, OCaml might be a good choice.

OCAML on Windows was such a pain several years back. It's good to hear that they've improved on it.

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