Microsoft Open Sources F# 212
aabelro writes "Don Syme has announced the release of the F# compiler source code as a code drop under Apache 2.0. He wrote, 'The F# PowerPack now includes libraries, tools and the compiler/library source code drops. I'd like to take a moment to explain the F# team's approach to this. Firstly, the source for the F# compiler in our MSI/CTP releases has been available for some time, in the releases themselves, so in that sense there's not much new in this release. Secondly, we've always made sure we have a free download binary release of F# available, and will continue to do that, and that should still be the main way you "get" a release of F#. However, we've long discussed making compiler+library source available in a different way. After some discussion, we've decided to do this via a "code drop" model, where we make available versions of the compiler+library code logically matching each release of the F# language itself.'"
Re:WTF is "F#"?? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a functional language following in the footsteps of the ML category of languages, but written for the .NET platform. It's open source with a patent grant, and the F# team has made sure each release has both a .NET and a Mono installer.
Re:What is F#? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What is F#? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What is F#? (Score:5, Informative)
Very few .NET languages have strong advantages over the others aside from programmer preference. It's more about which one you like coding in, as all of them have pretty much the same capabilities.
With that said, it appears that F# is essentially a tweaked OCaml syntax, whereas C# is a tweaked C++ syntax. It's really more about what you prefer coding in.
I must say though, despite loving my Linux desktop at home, I work in C# a great deal at work, and I love it. I know there's a lot of MS hate on Slashdot, but their development tools are amazing. I'd do a lot more coding in Linux if I had something that was similar to (and of the same quality, which throws out things like Monodevelop) Visual Studio.
Re:So .... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Congrats.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:F Pound WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
F-sharp (pseudo musical notation)
Re:Why when we already have Ocaml? (Score:5, Informative)
Literally, with C# and F# you can just define classes in either and call them in the other language directly.
Thats what sets this apart from Ocaml, and thats why people use it over Ocaml on
Re:So .... (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite so. There are plenty of companies out there that use Ocaml, F#'s undermaintained cousin. Jane Street, a private investment house, is one having perhaps the biggest Ocaml codebase next to Microsoft's. I see that MS opensourcing of F# compiler will lead to perhaps well-earned retirement of Ocaml from mainstream use. I think the biggest issue with Ocaml was that it was mainly a reasearch tool, maintained by INRIA. The developers have little incentive to have Ocaml do much besides what they need for their R&D, and that's understood and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What it leads to, though, is that Ocaml is rough around the edges, and not really ready for primetime outside of niches.
F# should IIRC run just fine under Mono.
Re:Nice, but... (Score:5, Informative)
No, this isn't a prelude to cancellation. MS is a heavy in-house F# user. All of static verification tools that Windows kernel team uses are AFAIK written in F#, and every driver that's signed by MS was tested using a static analysis tool written in F#.
Heck, they have seen so much internal demand for F# that they developed it in the first place -- initially, their static verifier codebase was written in Ocaml. They figured there's possibly so much more to be done in that area, that they developed a whole new programming language. That's as much commitment as you can get, in my book.
Re:Why when we already have Ocaml? (Score:5, Informative)
Because next to F#, Ocaml frankly said sucks. And I don't mean to be a troll. Almost anything you look at in Ocaml, F# has it better. Libraries, performance, interoperability, ...
All of the facilities of CLR are available from F# -- that includes vast core .NET libraries, all of 3rd party .NET libraries, interoperability with all of the code that runs on CLR,... To give a transportation analogy: the libraries available in Ocaml are to libraries available in F# like a car's driver is to a seagoing ferry.
Ocaml was developed by INRIA to support their own R&D program, pretty much. There is, understandably, little incentive for them to have Ocaml do much more besides what they themselves need. It's OK, really, there's only so much you can do with limited funds and the day only being 24h long.
Never mind that there are serious technical issues with the virtual machine that runs Ocaml bytecode, and with the runtime library that supports native-compiled Ocaml. Those issues are benign enough to allow Ocaml to be deployed in certain scenarios, but for a language platform to be widely used they are pretty much non-starters. F# runs on CLR, a platform that gets as much or more development resources allotted to it yearly than Ocaml saw through the whole of its long existence, including that of Caml-lite.
Re:So .... (Score:5, Informative)
nobody really cares about functional languages except a few nerds.
Nobody really cares about programming languages at all except a few nerds. As for applications, explain Jak and Daxter, the majority of which was written in a Lisp dialect called GOAL.
Re:So .... (Score:4, Informative)
Offtopic, but since you asked, I can explain it. They were following a cult of personality, and they got burned for it. They plan on C++ for all future projects.
"GOAL sucks! While it's true that GOAL gave us many advantages, GOAL caused us a lot of grief. A single programmer (who could easily be one of the top ten Lisp programmers in the world) wrote GOAL. While he called his Lisp techniques and programming practices "revolutionary," others referred to them as "code encryption," since only he could understand them. Because of this, all of the support, bug fixes, feature enhancements, and optimizations had to come from one person, creating quite a bottleneck. Also, it took over a year to develop the compiler, during which time the other programmers had to make do with missing features, odd quirks, and numerous bugs.
Eventually GOAL became much more robust, but even now C++ has some advantages over GOAL, such as destructors, better constructors, and the ease of declaring inline methods."
Re:So .... (Score:4, Informative)
F# should IIRC run just fine under Mono.
It does. In fact, if you look at the download page, Mono/Linux is an officially supported platform for F#.
One thing that needs to be understood about F# and why the attitude there is so remarkably different is that it is, essentially, a Microsoft Research project. Yes, it was productized and shipped "in the box" for VS2010, but a large number of folks who work on it are still from MSR.
Re:Great news for someone in scientific computing (Score:3, Informative)
I was intrigued with Sun's Fortress, but this has gone nowhere, and it is fundamentally flawed from the start in that it is tied to the JVM, which is no-no when it comes to high performance computing.
How's that again? I haven't seen any indication that CLR is better suited for HPC than the JVM. Not that I've looked extensively, mind you, but it seems like the two runtimes are not that far apart.
Re:What is F#? (Score:2, Informative)
Qt Creator [nokia.com]
Re:Does this mean that.. (Score:1, Informative)
You could try, but I don't recommend it. F# relies on .NET libraries and framework, and things like reflection. F# Interactive uses a lot of Reflection.Emit calls to generate bytecode on the fly. It's not just about changing the code generation: Many things in the compiler are bound to .NET, and you'll end up writing a clone of Mono.
It could make sense to port it to the JVM, but I suspect it's a lot work.
Re:Nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)
It already is officially supported on Mono; I don't know why you'd feel it needs to be ported. Might be worth doing for fun, but you can already run F# on pretty much all mainstream OSes, not just Windows.