some others worth checking out (all largely single-developer efforts):
http://www.ats-lang.org/ [ml + c + everything dialled up to eleven. linear and dependent types. comes out of academia, but under active development and slowly beginning to gather a community.]
https://eigenstate.org/myrddin/ [not really familiar with this one but it looks interetsing. close to the metal, has pattern matching over algebraic datatypes but seems more towards the c than the ml end of the spectrum from the brief glance i took.]
http://felix-lang.org/ [spawn of ml + c++ rather than ml + c. under enthusiastic if haphazard development.]
there have been a few others i've seen pop up over the years; i keep meaning to make a website or at least a github awesome-style list cataloguing and tracking them.
For all those propositions, I have only one question: Why would I use that instead of OCaml ?
OCaml is far from being perfect, but it has lot's of features and a decent community (especially compared to all those hobby/research languages).
OCaml can do pretty much anything except things like image processing and video game programming. I mostly don't care about those things, and if I did, I would use Rust.
Now, from a research point of view, sure, those languages are interesting.
i'm in the same boat - i keep an interested eye on developments in the ML-cross-C space, but so far none of them seems compelling to use over ocaml. however, if one of them had a cross-compiler as good as go's, that would be a killer feature. i would really like an ml-like language i could use to develop desktop apps and trivially deliver binaries for multiple platforms.
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