>   * Hacking a C generator inside Ocaml is non-trivial, because of the
>     garbage collector, currified function calls, and tail recursion
>     etc.

BTW, I was always surprised nobody had converted the bytecode interpreter
into a via-C compiler by unwinding the C code the interpreter goes through
to execute a specific OCaml bytecode program. You could even use this with
something like Clang to get JIT compilation to native code. Not very
efficient but surely much faster than interpreted bytecode...