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I wouldn't expect F# to be faster in anything actually, speaking as a .Net developer. OCaml is very well optimized and the abstract machine was well designed to have an efficient execution. Do you have any specific examples where the CLR is better?

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Yes, you can find several benchmarks on the language benchmarks game, for example. And I would expect that any situation where you use Spans in F# to outperform almost everything outside of native code (just like with C#).

Have you compared the two before?

I recall OCaml wasn't particularly fast with anything involving floats, IIRC because they often require boxing?

It's complex [1], OCaml does have a unboxed representation of floats in arrays [2] and records (provided all fields are floats), but elsewhere they are indeed boxed.

[1] https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/optimizing-small-vector-operatio... [2] https://v2.ocaml.org/api/Float.Array.html

Good point. Polymorphic code that doesn't reduce to an unboxed float representation can be slower because of the boxing, but I don't think such code is very common exactly for this reason. I wonder if OCaml developers have tried NaN-boxing to see how it would impact performance.

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