Open Source .NET – 1 year later | Hacker News Reader

Open Source .NET – 1 year later

mattwarren.org

98 pointsmatthewwarren31 comments

When the F# compiler finally gets working on CoreFX it will be a lot more interesting, IMO. While C# still has a lot of pros over Java, I still don't find it compelling enough with the wealth of alternate JVM languages I can use (Kotlin, Scala) when I'm working on a project that will be deployed anywhere but on Windows.

F# has a huge chance to get a lot of people who are interested in Haskell or OCaml, however. I love the language, but having to deal with Mono is not fun (it's tolerable, but not fun) - so I look forward to the day when I have an officially supported toolchain and CLR implementation to use it outside of Windows.

Hear this man. I'd love to use F# significantly more often than I do, but Mono and monodevelop are super worse than the official Microsoft alternatives. Once MS brings complete tooling over to mac, linux and the BSDs, that's a gamechanger.

What about Visual Studio Code? Runs on Linux and there's an F# plugin.

VSCode's F# support is extremely limited. Since F# is still statically typed but uses type inference to limit annotations trying to work without a proper IDE instead of a basic text editor can get really annoying.

It's not as high fidelity as Visual F# in Visual Studio, but Ionide[0] is a great option for writing code in Visual Studio Code or Atom.

[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/Ionide.Ionide-fsh...

I was referencing Ionide, unfortunately. Maybe it's improved in the last month since I used it, but everything but basic syntax highlighting barely worked.

There is Ionide, an atom based plugin for F#, which should work on nix and BSD.

It surely depends on the projects, but I always found using C# with Mono on Linux to be a pleasure.

Apparently some releases of F# already work on Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/languages/

There seems to be work under way for (and a status page) it: https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/wiki/F%23-for-Core...

And there's also a CoreCLR branch: https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/tree/coreclr

If anyone is interested in helping out, there is also a wiki page on how you can help port it to CoreCLR: https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/wiki/How-to-help-w...

I've heard good things about F#, but the lack of HKTs puts me off. If I want a more elegant/better organized Scala, Ceylon is on the table these days. What's the compelling thing F# has that the JVM options don't?

The lack of higher-kinded types is somewhat disappointing, but considering F# is still effectively a FP bolt-on to the CLR it's impressive what they do have.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of the ML-style syntax, in JVM land there is Frege but I'm less a fan of the full purity approach it derives from Haskell (I don't care how easy you say the IO monad is to work with, it drives me batty and I like to consider myself a pretty smart guy).

Type providers, excellent async support out of the box, active patterns, there's a lot of great features in F# as well that make it worth looking at.

> in JVM land there is Frege

... and OCaml: http://www.ocamljava.org/

Type Providers?

Glad you mentioned F#, I plan to have a look at its repo as part of a follow-post

As a c# dev I am quite excited about all this. Open source, cross platform, .net native, aspnet5.. very very nice.

Does anybody know what are other cmunities (ruby, python, nodejs..) up to an what is happening in their ecosystems?

Frontend type for a .net house, and I'm absolutely delighted at this new direction - lots of stuff ms were doing is legitimately awesome (I much prefer visualstudio to intellij, even if it steadfastly refuses to hilight my jsx syntax properly) but there was always that nagging feeling that we were working in a dull, Enterprise orientated, closed ecosystem whilst the cool kids got to play with all the shiny new toys.

That just isn't the case anymore, and might just have saved Microsoft's platform from slowly becoming Lotus Notes/Domino or something.

I think Microsoft is at it's best when it thinks it's in second place.

Nicely done, OP. I too, am excited about the new .NET landscape.

cheers, glad you liked it. I plan to do a follow-up post covering some ASP.NET repos and F#.

Returns a Page not found :(

yeah sorry about that, I'm blaming Wordpress for that one!!

Appears to be fixed.

Has Microsoft open-sourced the web development component (ASP.NET) with this or not?

All of ASP.NET 5 is open source (and cross-platform): https://github.com/aspnet

A lot of ASP.NET 4.x is open source, e.g. ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API.

ASP.Net is open for ages (longer than CoreCLR) and is completely developed in the open.

Well, everything but WebForms, the thing everyone likes to think is dead (we all wish, but it's a long way from retirement still).

And we've been able to at least read the source for a while officially at http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#System.Web and unofficially since forever via Reflector etc.

Yup!

https://github.com/aspnet

I've actually been running an ASP.NET site on a Linux machine for a few months using just all of their open source stuff. Works pretty well!

Yeah I plan to add these some ASP.NET repos to my analysis in a follow-up post

they have.

I would be interested if the windows version was compilable with mingw-64.

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