Considering OCaml strength especially in Compiler and code generation, one would expect it to have excellent developer tooling and be at the frontier when it comes to cross-compilation but we see younger languages like Zig offering more on that front while also having low resources (not sponsored by a mega corp).
I’m looking for technical or historical context. I saw answers like “lack of resources” and “small ecosystem” but what makes OCaml needs more resources than what others needed?. I’m interested in Compilers but not experienced enough.
I think it would be fair to say that the available resources are applied to those aspects which are considered to be most relevant at a point in time. Cross-compilation for OCaml, while nice to have, is not a priority (the request comes up every so often, but not very often). For Zig, cross-compilation is one of their primary use-cases.
For tooling in general, there is obviously an advantage in being younger (no need to maintain backwards compatibility to an established ecosystem), which I think is one of the main reasons why younger languages have nicer tooling. Having said that, there’s been tons of progress in the state of the OCaml tooling this last few years and I think this can be expected to continue.
I think it would be fair to say that the available resources are applied to those aspects which are considered to be most relevant at a point in time.
So it’s mainly the human factor, due to lack of interest/motivation to work on these problems. On the technical side there’s nothing that make these features unattainable or particularly challenging for OCaml compared to other languages?