^ This. Exactly my experience with it. Though, recently I'm using Java when I work with others on cloud-related projects and Scala (which is a ML+typeclasses+concurrency on the JVM) to write a compiler for OpenCL. For me, OCaml is great if you want compilation speed, fast iterations. Lacks in other departments: concurrency, parallelism, ergonomics, availability of libraries (outside compiler territory). Also, there's Flix that can have a lot of potential in the future, which is on JVM also: https://flix.dev/