alt Hacker NewsI bounced off OCaml a few years ago because of the state of the tooling, despite it being almost exactly the language I was looking for. I'm really happy with Gleam now, and recommended it over OCaml for most use cases.
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Did you consider using F#? The language is very similar to OCaml, but it has the added benefit of good tooling and a large package ecosystem (can use any .NET package).
Can you use Gleam for ad-hoc scripting? In my mind that means two requirements that most languages fail at.
1. You can import by relative file path. (Python can't.)
2. You can specify third party dependencies in a single file script and have that work properly with IDEs.
Deno is the best option I've found that has both of those and is statically typed.
I'm hoping Rust will eventually too but it's going to be at least a year or two.
I always assumed a runtime specialized for highly concurrent, fault-tolerant, long-running processes would have a noticeable startup penalty, which is one of the things that bothers me about Python. Is that something you notice with Gleam?