Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpeden | Hacker News Reader

You might enjoy F#. It's a lot like OCaml (which others have mentioned) but being part of the .NET ecosystem there are libraries available for pretty much anything you might want to do.

View on HN

Yes, F# is an often forgotten gem in this new, brighter cross-platform .NET world. :)

:-) Is F# a contender outside the .NET world?

There aren't many languages that can do server-side and browser-side well. F# is one of them!

Non .NET server-side?

You can do Node.js with F#

But these days .NET is a great server-side option. One of the fastest around, with a bit of tuning.

Fable compiles F# to Python, Rust, and Dart now, too, in addition to JS. I haven't tried Dart or Rust, but when I tried compiling its output to Python it was actually quite good!

What do you mean by "outside the .NET world"? F# is a .NET language (more specifically a CLR language). That question seems to be like asking "are Erlang and Elixir contenders outside of the BEAM world?" or "is Clojure a contender outside of the JVM world?".

F# being on top of the CLR and .NET is a benefit. It is very easy to install .NET, and it comes with a huge amount of functionality.

If you're asking if the language F# could be ported to another VM, then I'd say yes, but I don't see the point unless that VM offered similar and additional functionality.

You can use F# as if C# didn't exist, if that's what you mean, and by treating .NET and CLR as an implementation detail, which they effectively are.

This conversation could be referring to https://fable.io/

Other than that, the question is indeed strange and I agree with your statements.

You are generally right, but Clojure is a bad example, it is quite deliberately a “hosted” language, that can and does have many implementations for different platforms, e.g. ClojureScript.

Yea, that's true. I forgot about that. I did think of Clojure CLR, but I don't get the impression that this is an all that natural or used implementation so I ignored it. ClojureScript is obviously much more used, although it is still a "different" language.

https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

Reply on news.ycombinator.com