OCaml and Functional Programming Contest - May '14

About two weeks ago, I decided it was time for me to get experience with the ML-family of programming languages, so I installed OCaml and started writing programs. For motivation, I first followed the Functional Programming track on HackerRank and then entered this month's FP contest. (I scored 19th out of 161.) My thoughts so far on the language:

• Pattern matching is a great feature in a language. Pattern matching provides an "if-then" mechanism that can use both the input's value and the input's structure. In particular, the SKIBC translation problem from the contest decomposed marvellously into a recursive pattern match/transform function once you specify the proper data types.
• The standard library is weak. I had to write several debugging functions to print structures. Because of how Ocaml implements polymorphism and discards type information within the compiled output, it's basically impossible to write a generic 'to_string' function. It usually took more code to write the I/O routines (particularly in parsing the contest input) than to write the algorithms.
• Although I don't think there is a way to use them in HackerRank, Jane Street's OCaml library is an attempt at 'completing' the standard library and making it more competitive with other languages (e.g. Perl, Python, Ruby). It would be worth my time to study Jane Street's library.
• Performance profiling tools, at least as far as "how many times does this execute" are quite good. However, I have not seen a way to get a sense of how expensive individual operations are versus how often they are committed.