How does this compare to OCaml or Haskell? Most of the "benefits" you've mentioned here aren't actually benefits, but par the course for a programming language no matter what stack you choose.

Visual Studio seems to be the only real benefit I'm seeing (and I agree, it's a very major benefit).

Compared to OCaml, F# has slightly nicer syntax, real multi-threading, and type providers (can e.g. automatically generate a type from a database schema). It lacks OCaml's awesome module system, higher-kinded polymorphism, OCaml's neat but rarely-used object system (it has C#'s object system hacked on instead), and on Mono at least it is generally slightly slower than OCaml.

In my view the .net libaries are probably the biggest advantage over OCaml and Haskell. Similar to how access to Java libraries gives Clojure an advantage over lisps like Common Lisp and Racket.

Oh, and if you want to use Windows without mingw then F# is a far better choice than OCaml or Haskell. The OCaml packaged manager doesn't even work properly on Windows, as far as I'm aware.

Also it seems new versions of F# are released much more often than those of OCAML. Corporate backing is important.

They both seem to produce a new version about once a year, so there's not much difference there.

Great. F# is getting popular. We make https://dotnetfiddle.net/ and we added F# just because that was no#1 user request.