I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

IMO OCaml is mind-bending (e.g. go figure out the 'in' keyword, I still don't understand it), F# is much easier/simpler.

`let <var> = <expr> in <expr>` is an expression. Top-level bindings are just `let <var> = <expr>`. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

    let fac =
      let rec fac' acc = function
        | 0 -> acc
        | n -> fac' (n * acc) (n - 1)
      in
      fac' 1

    let seven =
      let four = 4 and three = 3 in
      four + three

https://ideone.com/HpTrI4

Ocaml is just an ML in the traditional sense. It keep scope without curlies. There is really not much else to it.

The 'in' keyword is purely syntax, like semicolons/newlines or braces in your language of choice.

Never used OCaml but it seems like a way to chain together expressions using the same variable name? Seems odd but I could see myself using it