MLton in the future

Dear all,

I am considering choosing SML and MLton for a new side project where I
will build a framework for local search optimisation algorithms. I
have previously written such a framework in OCaml during my PhD
studies. Now that I am going to more or less reimplement everything,
it is a good opportunity for me to try out MLton and its whole-program
optimisation philosophy.

However, when I look at the (latest) MLton release cycles and the
mailing lists it seems to me that the MLton development is not very
active anymore (3 years between the two latest releases, rather low
svn activity, not a very active user/developer list). So I am a bit
concerned of choosing MLton due to this. As performance will be
essential for my application, falling back on another (of the current
ones) SML implementation in the future is not appealing.

So I would like to ask here if my concerns are justified? Or can I
choose MLton and be confident that its development will continue,
possible bugs be fixed, and perhaps even that new features and
optimisations will be implemented?

Best regards,

Magnus