Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

* Runs great on Linux in my experience & others

* Great performance - https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

* Open source - Microsoft has made a lot of missteps but they have came a very long way. The bright side is both how far they've came & the outcomes of the recent missteps.

* Very productive toolset imo. I focus mostly on web based tech though. I really like the syntax & type system.

* Swiss Army Knife in that you can use .NET to do just about any type of project - Web (front & back end), mobile, games, IoT, desktop, machine learning, etc.

* You can use C# & F# syntax, both very popular (though let's all be honest, F# is a 2nd class citizen in .NET but it's got a great fan base)

View on HN

I don't think F# is that second class anymore especially if you are developing on Linux/Mac OSX. The more concise language/syntax is a big plus when you don't want the heavy IDE and want to be cross platform. The VS Code plugin for example seems more mature than Omnisharp and while like any other Code plugin less flaky than many of the others.

It seems to be keeping up with the broader .NET ecosystem pretty well I think - (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/whats-new-in-fsharp-6/). In some ways it is ahead of C# as well so I wouldn't say it is behind at all.

I think there's at least one way in which F# is a second-class citizen: documentation. The documentation for anything in .Net will contain code in C#, but code in F# is quite rare.

So if you want to use F#, I think you still need to be able to read C# code.

It might not be full second class but I dunno I'd go all the way to first class. For example F# doesn't support the source generators feature that came with .NET 5 (unless they added it in 6 and I missed it but when I looked at that post you linked I didn't recall seeing it).

They got type generators which somewhat influenced and predates the Source Generator feature by a few years. Not the same thing of course, and from what I've seen are slightly different in target/scope. (e.g. F#'s seems more appropriate for scripting where you can use it without a proj entry).

Do you mean type providers? That's their own type of nice thing but to your point it is only for generating types, source generators can generate much more than a basic type. Also I swear I saw somewhere type providers were not functioning as well in newer .NET but that was hearsay as I never tried them in 5 and now 6.

They are working in .NET 5 last time I checked. Opened an FSX script, "#r: nuget SwaggerProvider", point to a JSON API and it seems to work with IDE auto complete included with 2 lines of code, no project scaffolding, or package manager files required. Things seem to be improving on this front I guess as well.

I do agree - source generators have a better API as an implementer and can generate more than classes. I guess as soon as I need to jump into a proj file and I'm working with MsBuild anyway what stops me creating my own generation framework that runs before PreBuild that generates code for my compile step? I've done it before source generators were a thing.

I also did a quick Google search - Myriad (F# library) might be something that does something similar.

Oh Myriad looks super interesting. As I figure out what I want to do as I pick f# back up more seriously I'll have to keep this in mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com