While OCaml has long been valued in industry and academia for its powerful type system, memory safety, and performance characteristics, its tooling ecosystem has historically presented barriers to newcomers. This talk explores Tarides' recent initiatives to transform the OCaml developer experience through modernized tooling, streamlined workflows, and intuitive interfaces.We'll give an overview of initiatives, such as the Dune Developer Preview and Dune Package Management, look at the current state and recent improvements of editor integrations to support OCaml development, as well as give an outlook on what is coming.

By removing barriers to entry while preserving OCaml's core strengths, we aim to make functional programming more accessible to the broader developer community. This talk will interest both experienced functional programmers curious about OCaml's evolution and newcomers looking for a type-safe, high-performance alternative to mainstream languages.