One thing that put me off in the end was that it didn't support native OS threads (I have the same problem with Racket). Has threading support improved over the years?
The main push in this area is Multicore OCaml[1]. I don't track OCaml closely enough to know how getting this into the main compiler is going.
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Thread.htm...
However, because I am used to writing multithreaded code using pthread or std::thread, I find the standard OCaml model uncomfortable and limiting. Its mostly a matter of personal taste but this is the reason I stopped using OCaml.
Nope, different structs could have fields named the same.
For instance there is an instance of the Racket VM per place and this makes them heavier than it would be in a standard system programming language language such as C, C++ or Rust.
I am not saying it is better or worse -- just different.
[1] https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/dls11-tsffd.pdf
Regarding books, Real World Ocaml is very well written, although some examples might need tweaking.
Mostly wondering how people ship stuff if there are different variants of std libs? Say you write your code entirely using one std lib and then try to share it (the code that is) with somebody who uses a different std lib, then the onus of learning the new std lib is entirely on him, right? How does that work for teams then? I know that Jane Street is a big user and so they have considerable influence. That being said, does the std lib (the one bundled with the distro) have enough features (like all the necessary data structures, for instance) to make using it viable in a non-trivial project (off the top of my head, say writing a very simple web server)? If so then, I suppose that's good enough.
Any recommendations for learning material? I have a copy of "Practical OCaml", don't really like it. INRIA's materials seem quite substantial, but more like reference.
The migration from standard stdlib to alternate ones is fairly trivial(some signatures might differ but typed language means the compiler will catch them for you), so you can start using the stdlib and if you feel like writing some trivial things that should be in the stdlib or you need some advanced data structures you can use the alternate ones.
Also you need `lwt`(most people prefer this)/`async` library for writing concurrent programs like a webserver. `Cohttp` is a good library for doing http based client/servers. I strongly recommend `Real world ocaml` and the reference manual is excellent at looking up some new type-level features. Also reading well-known libraries code is an excellent way to learn a language.
I'll start off with "Real world OCaml" and see how it goes!
https://discuss.ocaml.org/