SML is one of my favorite languages (I've been (very) slowly writing a compiler & language server for it).
Sure, it has some warts/differences compared to newer languages - we have moved towards traits/typeclasses/etc, and I wish I could just write #[derive(Debug) - but I feel that SML fits in a very unique spot for programming languages. It's extremely simple, yet still powerful and expressive. I hope we will see continued work on SML/Successor ML descendants (like 1ML, etc), because I think there's still potential there
I think some updated language tooling would dramatically help.
I have the compiler on GitHub [1] - I just started working on it again after a 2-year hiatus (to finish my PhD).
As for language-server, I'm currently sketching out some plans to use SMLnj's "Visible Compiler" feature, since that seems the easiest path forward. I have a half-baked language-server based on MLton's def-use output, but it's too unstable to share. I am planning to make some progress on the language-server in the next couple weeks.
Sure, it has some warts/differences compared to newer languages - we have moved towards traits/typeclasses/etc, and I wish I could just write #[derive(Debug) - but I feel that SML fits in a very unique spot for programming languages. It's extremely simple, yet still powerful and expressive. I hope we will see continued work on SML/Successor ML descendants (like 1ML, etc), because I think there's still potential there
I think some updated language tooling would dramatically help.