The big win here is having a GC by default, with the ability to reduce heap allocations (via stack) just by adding in more typing annotations.
Switching to OxCaml with exclave_ stack_ annotations drops
p99.9 latency from 29 ns to 9 ns per packet on the dispatch
hot path, and removes GC pressure entirely (394 minor GCs to
zero over 25 million packets). Throughput is comparable [...]
I got a similar result with my 'httpz' stack a few months ago (https://anil.recoil.org/notes/oxcaml-httpz) which my website's been running on without drama. And, I gotta say, OxCaml's a surprisingly robust compiler for being packed full of bleeding edge extensions: not a single crash on my infra is attributable to a compiler bug (plenty of bad OCaml code, but not due to a compilation bug)Nim does much the same. It prefers the stack, wraps dynamic heap types in value-semantic unique pointers by default, and avoids implicit copies wherever it can. I could see compiled languages trending in the stack-managed direction long term.
I think robustness is helped a lot by the fact that it’s the production compiler used at Jane Street