OCaml also needed the brief but bright ReasonML moment to add/fix/improve some of the syntax IIRC and work on user-friendly error messages. But this should've definitely happened much much earlier than it did.
It doesn't help that the OCaml community also has the problem that a significant minority seem to resent the fact that one company (Jane Street) has written more OCaml than the the rest of the world combined and then some and so de facto controls the ecosystem.
Whereas the Go and Rust communities, for example, were just fine with having corporate sponsorship driving things.
They really don't, less than 5% of opam packages depend on Base and that's their bottom controversial dependency I'd say. Barely anyone's complaining about their work on the OCaml platform or less opinionated libraries. I admit the feeling that they do lingers, but having used OCaml in anger for a few years I think it's a non-issue.
What they do seem to control is the learning pipeline, as a newcomer you find yourself somewhat funneled to Base, Core, etc. I tried them for a while, but eventually understood I don't really need them.
Golang is interesting.. Hasn't steering loosened up a bit in recent years?
But going way back while yeah the team at Google controlled the direction, there were some pretty significant contributions from outside to channels, garbage collection, and goroutines and scheduling..
Moonbit the fast, compact and user friendly language for WebAssembly? Or Moonbit the language for industrial usage? Or Moonbit the AI-native general-purpose programming language?
(They are the same language)
Reason at least was an active collaboration between several projects in the OCaml space with some feedback into OCaml proper (even though there was a lot of initial resistance IIRC).
