I've been writing OCaml for quite some time now and I don't think any of those "pain points" are "pain" or really any problem with the language. I think they're more like a preference. The syntax or no forward references are just decisions that makes the language good in some ways and bad in others, and seems like you just really don't like the cons.
Also, isn't freedom of annotating a function a good thing, instead of having a requirement on it? You can just explicitly annotate some stuff when you have a type error that doesn't feel right!
OCaml is way more simple from the type system perspective than Rust, I think it makes it great when you need a lot of iteration on you code.
One thing I do agree on are problems with the ecosystem. Maybe not quite in the specific area described here but man we got some problems in IO/concurrency/asynchrony space. Making a GOOD standard for it would just improve all our lives as OCaml developers.
Also, isn't freedom of annotating a function a good thing, instead of having a requirement on it? You can just explicitly annotate some stuff when you have a type error that doesn't feel right!
OCaml is way more simple from the type system perspective than Rust, I think it makes it great when you need a lot of iteration on you code.
One thing I do agree on are problems with the ecosystem. Maybe not quite in the specific area described here but man we got some problems in IO/concurrency/asynchrony space. Making a GOOD standard for it would just improve all our lives as OCaml developers.