> You called me out for being pedantic about unsoundness which can lead to actual runtime errors

"actual runtime errors" can and do happen even in Haskell and Ada. Unit and integration tests are important, no matter the language. TypeScript's type system is a huge step up from Python's, and it's better than Go's in many ways. TypeScript's biggest weakness for me is probably that it runs on Node.js, which is single-core.

As I have previously expressed, the major benefit to TypeScript is that it performs much better than Python while offering a strong type system and a strong ecosystem. The main things OCaml seems to offer are a stronger type system and better performance, when compared to Python. OCaml's type system might be marginally better than TypeScript's, but the Pareto principle might suggest that the extra 20% isn't worth the 80% more effort it will require to make up for OCaml's ecosystem. As I've also pointed out that I strongly prefer multi-core systems, you'll notice that I stated up front that I lean towards Rust and Go, not TypeScript. I just think TypeScript is a great fit for the OP, who seems to have been looking for a faster, safer Python (since they're so interested in Rust) with a drop in library for every task (so they can have it done in an hour). The most you have disagreed there is by saying that TypeScript's type system is slightly unsound. Okay. So, you can choose libraries which have really sound types so you can't easily misuse the library, but likely the libraries contain incorrect behaviors. Alternatively, you can choose libraries that are battle-tested by tons of major companies, but their types might not prevent you from every last possible misuse of the library. Either way, you need to write tests for your code to make sure the results are correct. In fact, you might need to write a lot of otherwise common libraries because OCaml is so niche. I don't see how OCaml wins there for the OP's use case, but I'm sure someone finds that trade off preferable.

> Discounting every OCaml library as not being 'ergonomic or reliable', really smacks of goalpost-moving

It's really not, because I made it clear up-front that I was asking about good and/or battle-tested libraries, not just a list of first hits on google. But it is easy to fall back on the defensive by making it sound like I was shifting things around. I literally asked "how good" are the web frameworks, "how many good" database drivers are there, questions which elicit discussion, not just links. Not "are there web frameworks" and "are there database drivers". I tried to be very clear about this up front.

> No one even thinks like this about TypeScript, which by the way has library typings that are full of next-to-useless `any` and `function` types.

I don't agree with your assessment here, since that really just seems like a strawman argument. `any` is a useful tool when used correctly; how else would you build a custom container like a Vec or a HashMap? It would be annoying to have a container that should be fully generic that can only hold some restricted set of types because the type system isn't powerful enough to allow it. However, it would be truly pointless for someone to build a nice TypeScript library using mainly functions that receive and return `any`, so it doesn't follow logically that experienced people would do that. Why wouldn't they just use JavaScript? This idea doesn't pass the smell test. Do you have any evidence for it? In point of fact, people write TypeScript definitions even for JavaScript libraries! This allows people to provide a nice interface into the JS code, so they don't have to see `any` everywhere they look. Why would they care more about the types in JS libraries, which are only approximate, if they're leaving all of their own code without type checking? TypeScript definitions for JS are only approximate, of course, but that's the real world. They're still helpful, just like documentation for a REST endpoint. When you make a REST call to an API, you aren't guaranteed that everything will work as documented, it might reject valid inputs, it might accept erroneous inputs, it might return values of the wrong types... TypeScript definitions for plain JavaScript libraries give you an opportunity to create a wall around your TypeScript code where the unsafety is easier to contain, but there will always be some level of unsafety in the real world. Eliminating 80% of it is a great start. The last 20% is not as easy as the first 20%, and the cost should be weighed against the benefit.

> and then accuse someone of being 'upset' with their suggested languages

I don't think you understood what I had written. I was saying that it's very unlikely that someone would look at all three of Go, Rust, and TypeScript and decide that the specific problems you mentioned are such dealbreakers that they would choose OCaml. I wasn't talking about you or me being upset, I was talking about any third party analyzing the trade-offs, but you seem to have taken it as some kind of attack against you? It definitely wasn't.

I don't hate OCaml. I have followed it for years, hoping it will progress in ways that I find important. Even years ago, multicore was right around the corner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582980 but it's still not here, and it's still not in the foreseeable future.

> The Rust compiler is an amazing effort, but it would be a mistake to equate its maturity level to the OCaml compiler

Does it matter that OCaml's compiler has been under development for "more than two decades" if the amount of development is less than has happened on the Rust compiler in half the time? Rust, Go, and TypeScript have had staggering amounts of money and developer-hours dumped into both their compilers and ecosystems over the past few years, while OCaml's have barely moved at all, as far as I've been able to tell.

You can look at the numbers for the compilers:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors?from=2...

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/graphs/contributors?from=1995...

The uptick on OCaml seems to correspond to Facebook becoming interested, but on every metric (including total number of contributors, total number of commits, total additions, whatever), the Rust compiler has had a lot more developer-hours of attention than the OCaml compiler, which could be argued makes it more mature than the OCaml compiler... and this is just the Rust compiler frontend itself, which doesn't include the unbelievable amount of time and money that has been sunk into LLVM by Apple and others, which directly benefits Rust.

Let's just say that I don't agree with your conclusion about their relative maturity.

Let me reiterate: I do not hate OCaml. If anything, I'm annoyed with its stagnancy. It has so much potential, and I wish that potential would be realized. ReasonML is the best thing to happen to OCaml in the past 10 years, but that project has been so tightly focused on its objectives that it hasn't bolstered much of the surrounding ecosystem that would be desired for server-side initiatives.

I don't see how this comment thread can become productive, so I'm probably going to bow out now.