Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good - but Haskell has just got its fancy new epoll based I/O manager (100000+ lightweight threads) around that time, with the 7.0.1 release (16 November 2010)
They could have even take inspiration, imagine: typed, functional, monadic init files - "systemd: avoid success at all costs" :)
The topic is memory safety, not concurrency support, FWIW.
Lua would have been a good candidate: memory safe, coroutine to structure the code in a concurrent-ish way if needed, and you have a configuration file parser for free (just use Lua as the configuration language, it was its very first purpose after all).
That's nice in theory, but where are all the people who know Ocaml to write it and contribute to it ? I might be clueless but I can't really name any significant projects written in it, which might imply something about the number of people using it and being able to work on and contribute to something as large and important as systemd.
> Ocaml parallelism/concurrency story was not that good
I wouldn't expect CPU-bound multithreading to be much of a concern in an init/rc system. And resource thriftiness and predictability would likely be a bigger concern.
They could have even take inspiration, imagine: typed, functional, monadic init files - "systemd: avoid success at all costs" :)