What's New in F# 9

Re:What's New in F# 9 by modernerd on Sunday November 10, 2024 @02:45PM (#42102174)

Downsides: lack of jobs, libraries, learning materials, small community, little promotion by Microsoft outside of "what's new in F#" and other announcements.

It's a shame because F# is a beautiful language — it's fun to read, write and maintain. .NET now works well cross-platform with editors other than Visual Studio. General perks of .NET like cross-platform compilation are a nice bonus, for example, on macOS I can:

    brew install dotnet

    dotnet new console -lang F# -o HelloWorldApp

    cd HelloWorldApp

    dotnet publish -c Release -r osx-arm64 --self-contained

    dotnet publish -c Release -r osx-x64 --self-contained

    dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained

    dotnet publish -c Release -r linux-x64 --self-contained

To get self-contained binaries (that don't need .NET to be installed locally) for those platforms.

There is a decent multi-platform UI framework called Avalonia: https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

There are good actively maintained web frameworks: https://fsharp.org/guides/web/#web-frameworks

There are some passionate people writing great books about F#: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ddd/

Most of F#'s adoption issues seem to be because:

1. It's tough to convince people outside of the .NET community to use .NET.

2. Most of the people using .NET use C#.

3. It's hard to convince C# users to adopt F#. (See https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/16m0wdj/why_dont_yo... and similar threads.)

I'd love to work with F# full-time, but — short of starting my own company using it or convincing Microsoft to pay me to help them showcase its benefits — it's been hard to find work with F#, which drove me to spend time with other languages.

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Re:What's New in F# 9 by neonsunset on Sunday November 10, 2024 @03:02PM (#42102271)

F# can also be compiled with NativeAOT. The main thing this target complains about is printfn and especially printfn "%A" which uses unbound reflection. So as long as you just Console.WriteLine instead it may not emit warnings:

  dotnet publish -o {folder} -p:PublishAot=true

Note that -c Release is no longer required - it is now a default for 'publish'. Also, if you are doing a self-contained/non-AOT build, you may want to do it as follows to retain compact binary size:

  dotnet publish -o {folder} -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:PublishTrimmed=true

All the properties above can also be defined within respective .csproj/.fsproj files inside PropertyGroup blocks as e.g. <PublishAot>true</PublishAot> so you don't have to add them to a command every time.

F# also has excellent support for scripting with fsi and .fsx format: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tools/fsharp...

Someone even made a tool for it which builds on top of bflat allowing to compile F# script files into native binaries directly without project setup: https://github.com/ieviev/fflat

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's New in F# 9 by modernerd on Sunday November 10, 2024 @03:10PM (#42102313)

Thanks for the tips! I had thought there were still some other gotchas with AOT and F# but it looks like the list is smaller than last time I looked. https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/issues/13398

[ Parent | on HN ]