Ask HN: How viable is F# on Mono for real-life web apps?

Re:Ask HN: How viable is F# on Mono for real-life web apps? by autodidakto on Sunday April 06, 2014 @06:05PM (#7543279)

I played with Xamarin Studio + F# + OS X about a year or two ago. Right away I noticed that F# is a second class citizen in Xamarin. Weird bugs, weird warnings, unfinished parts, hard to find help online and in IRC channel. And since it's a smaller language, there are 1/100th the number of tutorials/resources at much lower quality. Anyone who wanted to run my app on Linux or Mac had to deal with Mono 2 vs Mono 3. Despite spending a lot of time, I never figured out how to compile a windows binary on Mac or a Mac binary on Visual Studio (or how to have a project folder that works both in Xamarin and Visual studio without both git problems and linking problems). Starting a C# project is a pleasant experience, starting a F# required searching for add-ons and manual configuring (both in Xam and VS). I couldn't even run the iOS sample app without paying hundreds of dollars for the full version because the iOS libraries made the binary (of the one page sample app) to big for the trial version. Response in IRC was "yeah, we know. Oh well".

A real shame. I'd love to dedicate myself to an open source functional language with a GUI toolkit that runs all platforms, desktop and mobile.

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Re:Ask HN: How viable is F# on Mono for real-life web apps? by profquail on Sunday April 06, 2014 @07:38PM (#7543742)

You say it's been a year or two since you tried Xamarin Studio + F# -- I urge you to give it a try again, using up-to-date versions of both (and Mono too). There has been a significant amount of effort put forth by the F# community in the past year to improve the F# + Mono + Xamarin Studio stack; in fact, Xamarin hired one of the best F# developers/consultants in the community (@7sharp9) specifically to improve F# support in Mono and Xamarin Studio.

If you have any questions, or you try F# + XS + OSX again and still run into issues, post something to the fsharp-opensource list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fsharp-opensource), or ask on StackOverflow.

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Re:Ask HN: How viable is F# on Mono for real-life web apps? by endeavour on Sunday April 06, 2014 @06:12PM (#7543326)

I think unfortunately this is true. But it's a chicken and egg problem. F# won't get more attention unless more people use it.

JVM developers seem to be much more open-minded than .NET developers for whatever reason. As someone who thinks F# is a much nicer language than Scala (the best JVM statically-typed, functional language) it's quite frustrating.

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Re:Ask HN: How viable is F# on Mono for real-life web apps? by olmo on Sunday April 06, 2014 @06:52PM (#7543551)

The reason is that C# is a better language than Java, so there is less pain and less reasons to move away to a newer language.

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