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Comment by snuxoll | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Type Providers?

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/

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

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