These are interesting observations. I'd love to hear more about them. Ocaml's problem, from what I've seen, is that INRIA wants to run a tight ship regarding t

These are interesting observations. I'd love to hear more about them. Ocaml's problem, from what I've seen, is that INRIA wants to run a tight ship regarding the design of the language. This makes sense, but it also means a lot of real-world use cases get ignored. For example, my understanding is that priming Ocaml for multicore use would require substantial rewrites that aren't a high priority, given INRIA's desire to maintain it as a "research language". The 2^22 - 3 array limit (and the corresponding 2^24 - 12 string limit) on a 32-bit machine (it's 2^54 - 3 on a 64-bit system) are examples of this: the language designers simply didn't anticipate that people would be using the language for purposes that require such enormous arrays or strings. These use cases are tremendously important for real-world production use but not terribly interesting from a research perspective.