I needed an excuse to try out OCaml...

Its a good time to try it. The tooling has come a long way and OCaml has an excellent build system [1] (dune is probably the best build tool I've used and I miss it whenever I use other programming languages), excellent editor tooling for vscode [2], emacs and neovim. OCaml 5.0 will bring multicore support [3] and an effect system that will cover a lot of interesting use-cases. As an example with OCaml 5 it'll be feasible to have concurrency libraries that still let you write in direct-style [4] [5]. I don't intend to say that OCaml will fit every use-case, but there is a lot going for it even in its current form before multicore support lands. If you want a language that compiles fast (it does compile really fast, at-part with Go if not better), has excellent performance characteristics, and has a good story for concurrency, you should give OCaml a chance!

[1] https://dune.build/

[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ocamllab...

[3] https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/the-road-to-ocaml-5-0/8584

[4] https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio

[5] https://github.com/anuragsoni/sandbox/tree/main/ocaml/effect...