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At the same time, OCaml has a very simplistic memory layout where even integers are boxed - Java at least has primitive types.

That surely has a performance cost.

Are you sure about boxed integers? Perhaps you mean floats? As far as I know Ocaml uses the typical integer/pointer divide.

IIRC it has 31-bit integers, which means you can't natively work with 32-bit data without widening.

or 63 bits on 64 bit architectures.