As a fan of O'Caml, I have to ask: what's the status of F# on .NET?
...and is it used much compared to C#, or is its use at least growing, or is it stagnating/dying?
...and is it used much compared to C#, or is its use at least growing, or is it stagnating/dying?
As .NET 6 and MAUI started to come on the scene, stuff went haywire pretty badly, tooling issues like breakpoints in Visual Studio no longer working in my projects, obscure build errors, confusing build warnings, dependency hell particularly with Xamarin.Android NuGet packages and Xamarin.Essentials. I'm still not up to date with all NuGet packages because doing so breaks my app at runtime. I'm in this halfway point in regards to use of the PackageReference project type. Things haven't been smooth lately for F# and Fabulous projects.
Things are slowly getting better though, and I would say that my experience is probably not entirely typical due to the inclusion of Xamarin, which introduces a whole additional layer of crazy. I think if you were to use F# for backend web services for example, then your experience would probably be a great deal more palatable than mine. I don't think F# is stagnating or dying by any means, but I do feel that it is still a second class citizen to C#. I hope MS continues to work towards this not being the case, because with all the "batteries included" of .NET behind it, I think F# is a great functional-first language.
It is, hands down, my best experience working in a functional language. I do hobby work in it, and it seems super nice, but I'm not sure where everyone is.
> still very few people use it.
Looking at a chart of GitHub and StackOverflow usage[1], OCaml/F# seem almost steady compared to the other functional languages, my suspicion is that Rust absorbed a lot of programmers looking for functional concepts in programming languages.
[1]: https://tjpalmer.github.io/languish/#y=mean&weights=issues%3...
It’s a great platform, in some ways it’s like a secret weapon…
I joke that F# is kinda “easy-button Rust” lol
The productivity benefits are small and sprinkled - I don't personally think there isn't one "killer feature/app". It isn't just one thing, its little things that add up. Given the team jumped from other ecosystems (e.g. Go/Node/etc) they found F# easier to approach than C#. This is the perspective of the team I run and it comes up in PR comments (I do less code writing these days). Comments like "don't have to do this in F#", or "we need a framework for this because C#" are known to occur. Easier unit test writing, less dep injection headaches, concise function passing, easier inlining of math for perf, easy mocking/stubbing, unions, etc etc.
The big weakness to me is that the people that use it typically don't want to flaunt it, and that means good mentoring, the best/simple patterns to use, etc and management buy-in are not really public. Communities that you can join are not into large scale apps, meaning good scalable patterns and lessons learnt are hard to find.