Another big obstacle was that the INRIA license effectively prevents forking the language (you can only distribute modified compilers as original source + patch, not as eg a github repo) so for a long time there was a bottleneck on the language evolution. Lots of useful extensions (eg delimited continuations, staging) wilted and died because of that.
The rise of OcamlPro and Ocaml Labs does give me hope for the future of the language. There is already renewed momentum behind fixing packaging and handling multicore.
Now if someone would just figure out ad-hoc polymorphism (just pick one of the dozens of propasals) and maybe even document camlp4/5....
Comments
Another big obstacle was that the INRIA license effectively prevents forking the language (you can only distribute modified compilers as original source + patch, not as eg a github repo) so for a long time there was a bottleneck on the language evolution. Lots of useful extensions (eg delimited continuations, staging) wilted and died because of that.
The rise of OcamlPro and Ocaml Labs does give me hope for the future of the language. There is already renewed momentum behind fixing packaging and handling multicore.
Now if someone would just figure out ad-hoc polymorphism (just pick one of the dozens of propasals) and maybe even document camlp4/5....