I agree that the issues you mentioned are annoying warts for Ocaml but I'm not so sure that they are all concessions to imperative programming. The 31-bit ints

I agree that the issues you mentioned are annoying warts for Ocaml but I'm not so sure that they are all concessions to imperative programming. The 31-bit ints have more to do with simplifying the garbage collector implementation. The "generic" comparison operators have more to do with the lack of type classes. This has a bit to do with the imperative bits of the language (which make implementing type classes a bit harder) but also has to do with conflics with the existing module system (ocaml Functors support type encapsulation and some other things that make it harder to add type classes to the language)