However pulling these over more than 1 core is still a problem. OCaml 4.05.0 should have infrastructure for that (although OCaml multicore has been somewhat a `duke-nukem forever` story)
I agree. That said, ML is definitely a small language like Go, without OCaml's extras like the object system.
Alas, ML lacks Go's awesome and very modern standard library, which is a key part of Go's allure.
But yes, I would adore a functional language with Go's best features, particularly the standard library, solid concurrency, simplicity/ease-of-learning, fast compiles, binaries, static, etc.
But I think part of the problem with both is tooling. Build and dependency tooling in particular. Opam was a good step in the right direction, but I think OCaml and SML could both benefit from a Cargo-like tool, that made managing projects and their dependencies simpler.
Some of it's parallelism and concurrency features should look familiar to you (it has an M:N threading model), complete with channels, and some stuff you've probably never heard of like STM. It compiles to a binary, has a type system much more powerful and expressive than Go's, and the community is very helpful.
I will say the compile times aren't very speedy, I assume you want fast compile times in order to type check your code, and for that there is ghc-mod.
That's one of the things I love best about Go. Compile for your platform, then copy the binary somewhere else and run it. Awesome.
I really want this to be true for Haskell too, but there's a glaring exception with libgmp. Google "haskell libgmp" for many stories of people thinking they could just copy their haskell program to a new system and run it, only to realize they were wrong.
edit: Ah ok, apparently libgmp is dynamically linked in binaries, but you can pass a flag to GHC to statically link all runtime dependencies. Is that what you were talking about?
cargo check
Also, I think a lot of people are attracted to Go because it's very simple to learn and use. Rust with its borrow checker is definitely not simple to learn and use.
But it's true Rust has some functional features.
I know that some people downplay the importance of these things; I find that because Rust has strong guarantees in these areas it helps to reduce work, reduce bugs and increase confidence in the software.
And use 'cargo check' during Dev for faster compiles.