I'm not deeply familiar with reliability-focused languages, but as far as I know, Ada, Rust, and Haskell are the most prominent ones. What made OCaml a better choice here over those alternatives?

(author of the post here)

Hey Maksadbek! Great question. It's a trade-off between speed of writing and trust in what you wrote, and OCaml (especially OxCaml) sits at a really good point on that curve.

Ada/SPARK has the strongest verification story and decades of space heritage, but the development cost is higher. Rust would work too, but I actively want a GC by default with the option to turn it off on the hot path. That is exactly what OxCaml's mode system gives you: zero minor GCs on the dispatch loop in the post, while the rest stays GC-managed. Haskell is great for type-driven design but its runtime cost-model is harder for low-jitter work.

Plus, the OCaml ecosystem gave me solid foundations on both fronts. For the protocol stack: MirageOS-style clean separation between wire serialisation, pure state-machine management and I/O, with ML modules and GADTs that map naturally onto protocol state machines. For the crypto: mirage-crypto for OCaml-facing primitives (fiat-crypto under the elliptic curves), and libcrux for ML-DSA-65 post-quantum signing. The CCSDS and BPv7/BPSec layers themselves I had to write from scratch (my earlier posts walk through how), and 20 years of OCaml muscle memory definitely helped!

Hey Thomas, thank you for detailed explanation! This sounds very interesting. I really wanted to learn something less complex than Rust/Haskell and fast enough for high performance computing and also reliable language. I should learn some OCaml :)