Becoming an F# contributor

http://mrange.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/becoming-an-fsharp-contributor/

by numo16 • 12 years ago

82 23 12 years ago

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Ironballs• 12 years ago

It's strange how appealing F# becomes once you realize you have the full power of the Visual Studio debugger and the .NET libraries. To someone who has mostly worked with Haskell (w.r.t. functional languages), that sounds great. Good debugging is absolutely essential - though with strongly typed functional languages, it's not often that necessary. But it's nice.

Then again, it's a very liberal language, if the end of the spectrum is Haskell. It allows side effects and mutable variables. While very convenient, nothing forces you to use these though. There are immutable data structures for everything. But it seems there are all the functional tools you'd want.

It's not Haskell, it's not pure and beautiful like it, but you still have computational expressions, which allow you to implement monads; metaprogramming, operator overloading, units of measure, and active patterns.

My only gripe is that the compiler doesn't translate functions that can return null to return an option value (i.e. Maybes), and null values in general! Would make interfacing the .NET library much cleaner. Right now I have to do something silly like this:

  let notNull a = if a <> null then Some a else None

So I have to pipe every function call that may return null to this function when I'm in the Maybe monad, which is frankly a bit bothersome.

Still. Even being able to use the Maybe monad when working with .NET is really cool.

pjmlp2• 12 years ago

Then again, it's a very liberal language, if the end of the spectrum is Haskell. It allows side effects and mutable variables.

Like the majority of ML languages. Haskell is pretty special here, being the descendant of Miranda.

Personally I think ML languages of OCaml branch are better for the general programmer public, as the entry level is a lower.

amirmc2• 12 years ago

For those who may be interested in contributing to the OCaml language, the Compiler Hacking Wiki is a good place to start.

https://github.com/ocamllabs/compiler-hacking/wiki

moron4hire3• 12 years ago

How do you feel about having a different set of operators for integers and reals? Like "+." versus "+".

guiomie2• 12 years ago

I'm still hesitating between learning Common Lisp or F# for my next web service project. I work with C# in my day job, so F# seems like a no brainer, but I'd like to get away from the CLR and there isn't much out there on getting F# running with vnext on linux (digital ocean).

Any opinions?

As for the posted link, quite interesting, a similar one for C# would be cool.

Touche• 12 years ago

Yeah I wouldn't spend time on F# on non-Windows until the community builds up more. So you probably want to try either OCaml or, if you're up for a bigger challenge, Haskell.

melling• 12 years ago

How are the Mac and Linux Mono versions? Are they production ready? It's not really about the "bigger challenge", but being able to ship code that solves real problems for clients.

guiomie2• 12 years ago

This is actually my impression, that Mono isn't at the same level of performance than the windows counter-part. I guess we can expect with .Net Core to see improvements. But will the Mono runtime ever be as good as the CLR ? The CLR isn't open sourced. The whole open-sourcing happening in the .Net world is quite interesting, but It is also confusing the hell out of me.

profquail• 12 years ago

You should ask on the fsharp-opensource[1] mailing list; a large portion (maybe even a majority) of the posters on there are using Mac/Linux/BSD for their F# development/deployment.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fsharp-opensource

jackfoxy• 12 years ago

tl;dr

The F# language has been open source for 4 years and MS has accepted pull requests to the compiler, core library, and tools for over 6 months (100+ PRs going into F# v4.0). Now with Microsoft fully committed to open source and cross-OS development with .NET Core, this is a very good time for hackers interested in meta-programming to get in on the ground floor of F#, the only functional language fully supported by .NET.

This article is a complete guide to hacking on the F# core, in this case an end to end example of extending the core library, including setting up standard unit tests. And mentions looking to F# Language Design User Voice, http://fslang.uservoice.com/ as the source for extension inspiration. One thing mentioned in the article, that F# will "likely" move from codeplex to Github, should read that the MS team is committed to fully migrate to Github, they are just busy right now with v4.0 of the language.

Becoming an F# contributor

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