I knew OCaml was being used by a number of big finance companies, or that it had been used. I really didn't know it was still active. Has anybody here used it? How was it?
Sure, but Jane Street, as mentioned here, is probably the largest user of it that I'm aware of. It is a great language, but F# is the more pragmatic choice these days. OCaml doesn't have a huge ecosystem where as F# inherits all the .NET libraries.
Most ordinary shops are just better off avoiding these stacks altogether. They don't really all that much compared to your C based languages. And its pointless to keep your hiring pool small.
There is also a steep learning and onboarding curve to climb when you onboard new employees. Significantly low help when you face issues, and just overall lack of help and information when you are stuck in a non-trivial issue. This is not just with F# or OCaml, but with all non-C based languages.
Only reason hedge funds can continue using this is they can pay people to suffer through this.
I've barely touched OCaml but having worked professionally in Haskell for a few years I thought that OCaml was terrible. However, Jane Street has invested heavily in it and maybe their codebase is better than the glimpse I got of the language.
