[dhekir]

OCaml is good for handling abstract syntax trees (strong typing, pattern matching) and its mix of imperative and functional programming don't require using borrow-checker nor monads. You can also consider Reason, if you prefer a more C-like syntax.

[rienbdj]

Also consider F#! In some ways it is more limited (no first class modules) but in others it is arguably better (operator overload, C# ecosystem, a slick take on do-notation).

[piinbinary]

I really ought to learn OCaml (besides just the toy programs I've written). I think if I got past the messy ecosystem (is tuareg the right thing to use, or is that the old thing?) I'd really like it.

[loxs]

I just migrated fully from OCaml to Rust. Couldn't be happier. I cannot even start to explain how big a difference a stable and mature ecosystem (including tooling) makes.

Language-wise, Rust leaves some (small) things to be desired with regards of ergonomics, but this isn't even close to offsetting the general feeling of developer friendliness and fitness to the problems it aims to solve. The borrow mechanics/lifetimes are godsend and one starts to wonder why all languages are not like this.

Rust completely exhausted the problem domains of these languages (for me): Java, Go, OCaml, even Python for something that would require more than 50 lines of code. Once you "get it", it's not harder to write than these.

OCaml still has some very advanced features (types) like polymorphic variants, GADTs and others, which I have used in the past to elegantly solve (in a type safe way) problems. But at least for my use-cases (and the software that I migrated) these were mostly problems created by the functional, garbage collected nature of OCaml. With Rust's imperative (but still very type-safe) nature I just don't need to apply such complicated idioms - it seems to fit perfectly to the "real world problems". And on top of that I get 3-4x speedup "for free" (for the program that I migrated). I added some very "lightweight" (as in "easy to do") parallelism and I got another x3 speedup (for the most frequent use case). This kind of speedup makes a dramatic difference. It enables me to do things that were previously not possible in the OCaml version.

And yes, on top of that I get to use Cargo, which feels decades ahead of every other package manager I have used and the IDE support (at least in IntelliJ/CLion) is pretty good (OCaml is nowhere near).

PS. And Traits are extremely cool

[blandflakes]

I always wonder if I just showed up late when I hear about the ecosystem! I just get opam for packages, dune for building, and merlin for editor integration (I did pay the complexity task using a language server for neovim, but merlin integrates with vim pretty trivially). It was easier than setting up Java + mvn|sbt|whatever + Intellij, easier than Python... there's maybe more going on than Go because the tools aren't all in one distribution, but man are the returns over Go massive (for the things I value).