Yeah, here's the quote: "(Note, long after I wrote this entry: I think OCaml has some fairly fundamental problems that keep it from being a first choice for server-side development. If I were to use it for anything, it would be as a substitute for C++ in delivering client-side executable/GUI programs, e.g. for Windows systems. And I still think it's a really cool language.)"

Anyone know what he's referring to?

Maybe the lack of parallelism in OCaml's threads at the time he wrote that?

There are now at least two solutions to obtain speedups on multi-core and multi-processor machines plus scalability by allowing seamless distributed processing: the JoCaml extension, which integrates the join calculus (http://jocaml.inria.fr/), and coThreads (http://cothreads.sourceforge.net/), which comprises shared-memory (with extensions like STM) and message passing while keeping backwards-compatibility with the original Threads library.

He's criticized the lack of a generic print function, calling it "a face-smashing insult to usability."

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/when-polymorphism-fails

Note that like many of the alleged deficiencies of OCaml, this was a compromise for performance.

Good find. I don't see how this keeps OCaml "from being a first choice for server-side development" while making it an acceptable language for client-side development, though.

There are a several hackish polymorphic print implementations, but the best solution so far seems to be the "deriving" camlp4 extension (http://code.google.com/p/deriving/wiki/Introduction). This looks pretty good:

     type 'a tree = Leaf of 'a | Branch of 'a tree * 'a * 'a tree
	 deriving (Show)
     
     type point = { x : float; y : float }
	 deriving (Show)
     
     let points = Branch (Leaf {x=0.0;
				y=0.0;},
			  {x=2.0; y=2.0},
			  Branch (Leaf {x=1.0; y=1.0},
				  {x=1.0; y=0.0},
				  Leaf {x=0.0; y=1.0}))
    		      
    Show.show<point tree> points
    =>
    "Branch
       (Leaf {x =0.; y =0.}, {x =2.; y =2.},
	Branch
	  (Leaf {x =1.; y =1.}, {x =1.; y =0.}, Leaf {x =0.; y =1.}))"