In some strange way, that is what I like about the language. OCaml is not about amassing the largest possible user base but making a great programming language. Of course, these two objectives are not contradictory but the point here is that OCaml aspires to be a language on which you can write ground breaking and innovative software, not necessarily _popular_ software.

OCaml has an academic flavor -- maybe it's not as academic as Haskell but it moves in similar ways. There is a desire to be correct and have a theoretical framework instead of amassing a ton of language features. OCaml is the foundation for Coq and other interesting compilers, type checkers and theorem provers. Over the years, the language has grown more mainstream and you can build a decent web backend on it today, for instance.

So fine, maybe multicore won't change adoption of the language in significant ways. But I foresee that the introduction of multicore will allow some amazing software to be written in OCaml in the future. Software that is truly groundbreaking and innovative. Take the example of Coq itself -- it is an important foundational software today in Computer Science. Multicore will allow Coq to potentially speed itself up and that will bring more real world applications in the ambit of Coq.

I completely agree, only libraries in popular domains might