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OCaml compiler is incredibly fast. I wonder how it'd fare with Jane Street's extensions for the borrow checker etc in OxCaml, if it's good enough for their HFT I'm sure it's good enough for a new language.

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I wrote a toy Scheme implementation in OCaml by using the Camplp4 preprocessor. In benchmarks, it was faster than Gambit Scheme, which compiles through C.

Sounds interesting, have you put it online somewhere?

No. I wrote it about 10 years before GitHub existed, and it’s just a toy. All it does is transform core Scheme syntax to Ocaml syntax, converting untyped values in the usual way to a ‘Value’ sum type.

I originally thought it would be slower than the faster Scheme compilers, like Gambit, because of how naive it was, but I was surprised to find that on benchmarks, including compute-heavy ones like fractals and I/O heavy ones like web serving, it outperformed Gambit. That’s really a reflection on Ocaml though, I didn’t do anything special.

If you asked an LLM to do that today, it could probably produce something better for you pretty quickly.

I suspect this "not a systems language" alludes only to OCaml's rather steeper learning curve and until-recently difficulty with multiple threads. I am sure it could roll just fine as a single-threaded compiler language written by a small team, which indeed, it was.

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