it seems to me that ocaml/(ocaml zealotry) > haskell/(haskell zealotry). This of course does not suggest that Ocaml>Haskell, only that one must probably apply some coefficients in favour of Ocaml given that it is extra-anglo-saxon domain and therefore probably suffers some marketing disadvantage.

Just a casual observation of the commento-sphere after a lay imperative programmer's cursory research of functional programming. This post, sample-of-one hugely notwithstanding, seems in the absence of counterpoints to suggest that, as potentially narrow as the benchmark may be, Ocaml has some very strong arguments against Haskell on the compiler implemenation front.

I can't help but wonder if this GC outperformance is the flipside of the coin of Ocaml's much maligned lack of multi-core capability.

Well said, and I feel exactly the same way (as an interested observer)

Mutable strings are on the way out though. 4.02 introduced -safe-string and 4.04 lets you build compilers and OPAM switches that mandate it.