OCaml in industry 2007-2010

Looking back, there have been a number of significant advances in the use of OCaml in industry over the past few years:

• The number of developers contributing to the OCaml code base at XenSource grew to 18 in November 2008. XenSource was subsequently sold to Citrix for US$500,000,000.
• The number of full-time OCaml developers at Jane St grew beyond 30 in January 2009.
• MIT startup Cilk Arts sold their Cilk++ tool chain, which is partly written in OCaml, to Intel in August 2009.
• Intel, Jane St, Citrix, CEA, OCamlCore, SimCorp and MLState paid to join the CAML Consortium (now 11 members in total).
• Coherent Graphics shipped their first product, written in OCaml.
• The world's largest people search engine, Wink, was launched (and it is written almost entirely in OCaml).
• MLState released their first product, Opa, which is written entirely in OCaml (Nov 2009).

And, of course, Microsoft released the world's first mainstream functional programming language F# in April 2010 and it is a close relative of OCaml. That had the knock-on effect of boosting interest in OCaml considerably.