As someone who writes fairly SML-ish OCaml, there definitely are benefits to using OCaml (even if only for the library and tool support... opam really is pretty

As someone who writes fairly SML-ish OCaml, there definitely are benefits to using OCaml (even if only for the library and tool support... opam really is pretty awesome) over SML. I rarely end up even using the object system and other features that SML lacks, but I find the syntax a bit nicer to read and write. And unlike C++, the standard library doesn't force all the bloat you don't want to deal with on to you, so it's no big deal to write code in SML style.