> I feel if OCaml had got its act together around about 2010 with multicore and a few other annoyances[1] it could have been Rust.

No, that wouldn't have made the difference. No-one didn't pick up OCaml because it didn't have multicore or they were annoyed by the semicolons.

People don't switch languages because the new language is "old language but better". They switch languages because a) new language does some unique thing that the old language didn't do, even if the unique thing is useless and irrelevant, b) new language has a bigger number than old language on benchmarks, even if the benchmark is irrelevant to your use case, or c) new language claims to have great interop with old language, even if this is a lie.

There is no way OCaml could have succeeded in the pop culture that is programming language popularity. Yes, all of the actual reasons to use Rust apply just as much to OCaml and if our industry operated on technical merit we would have migrated to OCaml decades ago. But it doesn't so we didn't.

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brabel 4 days ago | parent [-]

I appreciate both OCaml and Rust, but your view seems to be entirely wrong to me, sorry to be blunt.

People wouldn't care much for Rust at all if it didn't offer two things that are an absolute killer feature (that OCaml does not have):

* no GC, while being memory safe.

* high performance on par with C while offering no-cost high level conveniences.

There's no other language to this day that offers anything like that. Rust really is unique in this area, as far as I know.

The fact that it also has a very good package manager and was initially backed by a big, trusted company, Mozzila, while OCaml comes from a Research Lab, also makes this particular race a no-brainer unless you're into Functional Programming (which has never been very popular, no matter the language).

	▲	lmm 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		>> a) new language does some unique thing that the old language didn't do, even if the unique thing is useless and irrelevant >> b) new language has a bigger number than old language on benchmarks, even if the benchmark is irrelevant to your use case > * no GC, while being memory safe. > * high performance on par with C while offering no-cost high level conveniences. My point exactly! > was initially backed by a big, trusted company, Mozzila, while OCaml comes from a Research Lab Mozilla is not large and trustworthy, as you can see by the fact they haven't kept funding Rust development (because they can't afford to)! People weren't picking Rust because it had better backing or a bigger ecosystem, not in the early stages that made the difference - it didn't.