Yeah though iirc they did have to rewrite the runtime to get multicore so who knows what sort of tradeoffs they'd have had to make to have had it be like that from the beginning. A lot of what made it good (to the extent it was) in the 2000s was you got a very sophisticated type & module system and a fast compiler without giving up any runtime performance compared to its peers. I don't know if that would have been achievable with its dev resources alongside multicore early. I don't know that it wouldn't either though. Just a big what if all round.

I suspect a larger or at least comparable limitation was essentially pretending windows didn't exist for uh like thirty years. If you knew what you were doing you could cross compile for it but it was not easy. Getting a dev environment running on windows was basically impossible until like five years ago.

The syntax idk I don't have strong feelings about it. I initially recoiled like everyone else of course, but to me style and naming conventions are almost as important and on that front ocaml's are also among the worst in the world lol. Once you get used to it it's kind of endearing how fucked up it is.