>In F#, all variables, functions, types and files can only depend on variables, functions, types and files defined earlier. The benefits of this are the fact that a circular dependency is not possible by default and extra clarity with “what depends on what”, which helps during code analysis and PR reviews
Ehm. So it's like C... with no forward declarations?
In C you can have a function using a global variable, and change to this global variable will affect the function behavior.
The XML is not part of the language. You could invoke FSC manually (again, with the files listed in the correct order).
It scales very well IME.
Would C# be better with circular library dependencies?
Here's an example of a worst-case scenario (GUI frameworks and the extensions have notoriously huge amount of code): https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI/blob/master/sr...
But realistically an average project would look closer to this instead: https://github.com/DiffSharp/DiffSharp/blob/dev/src/DiffShar...
Once you have enough files, it might be a good idea to factor out separate concerns into different projects.
Dealing with cycles in Python is a total pain full of cryptic error messages, while in Rust cycles are fine as all top level items "come to exist" at the same time so they can depend on each other without any issues, and it makes refactoring a breeze.
Sounds like a compiler limitation touted as a feature.