Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez helped create OCaml at INRIA as an object-oriented successor to Caml.
OCaml began as Objective Caml, an extension of the Caml language family developed at INRIA. The project combined functional programming with object-oriented features, modules, algebraic data types, pattern matching, and static type inference.
Its compiler can produce native machine code as well as bytecode, helping OCaml serve both research and production software. The language has been used in areas including theorem proving, compilers, formal methods, and systems development.
OCaml is often mixed up with Standard ML because both are statically typed functional languages with powerful module systems. They are separate members of the ML family. F# is another related language, but it is primarily associated with Microsoft’s .NET platform.