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F# on FreeBSD

blogs.msdn.com

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A Microsoft developer network blog speaks about availability of a functional language by MS on FreeBSD.

Verily, the last times have come, and MS is turning into IBM! :)

(BTW MS maintain an internal Linux distribution, among other things. Probably we should expect more things like this.)

Does MS really have an internal Linux distro? Do you know what they use it for?

http://www.mslinux.org/

they've even got commits in the Linux kernel!

They have commits in the kernel just because they want to run Linux on Hyper-V and they need drivers to support it.

They we're later criticized for not maintaining the code and etc. But after that I think that MS improved the code and continued commiting updates.

A friend of mine that works in MS uses it for Skype-related development. MS have deployed a number of Linux-based Skype supernodes to improve connectivity.

MS actually has a deep Unix history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Well, that's not linux though.

Another Microsoft developer has been working on Hyper-V drivers for FreeBSD, which've recently been merged into the master branch: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/vendor/hyperv/dist/

Once they're polished, I hope we'll see FreeBSD VMs supported on Azure!

Once they're polished, you can just make sure it runs on your local copy of Hyper-V, then upload a VHD yourself. Azure's underrated on things like this.

They also use NetBSD internally, and indeed contributed a port: http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/support_for_microsoft_emips...

I'm a lot more impressed now that I see the port is Mono and not MS' own "rotor" implementation.

F# has been making great inroads in the past several months within "traditional" .NET shops (i.e., Windows + Visual Studio). However, there is a significant portion of the F# community who develop and/or deploy their code on Mono; in fact, the F# tools are shipped as part of the Mono distribution for OS X.

If you want to read more, there are a number of threads regarding Mono + (Linux|OSX|FreeBSD) on the fsharp-opensource mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/fsharp-op...

Ice cubes in your beer.

Enjoy!

The ice cubes Team

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