Comment by hutao

Over the past few years, OCaml has seen an abundance of new language features and standard library additions. OCaml 4.08 added let-binding operators (syntactic sugar for continuation-passing style and monadic programming), OCaml 5 implemented a multicore runtime and effect handlers, OCaml 5.3 finally added dynamic arrays to the standard library, and OCaml 5.4 added labeled tuples.

With unboxed types, I believe OCaml would achieve similar granularity over memory allocations as C#: garbage-collected, but supporting "structs" which are allocated on the stack (or inline the same heap allocation when part of a reference type). I think there is an unexplored space for "soft" systems programming languages that retain a garbage collector by default, while also allowing the programmer to tightly control memory allocations in performance-critical code.

If OCaml hits this sweet spot in abstraction, what domains would adopt it? Could OCaml potentially compete with C#, or Swift?