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Why F#?

(batsov.com)
447 points bozhidar | 2 comments | 01 Apr 25 12:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.448s | source
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loxs ◴[01 Apr 25 14:23 UTC] No.43547130[source]▶
I tried F# some years back when I was searching for a language to port my OCaml project in... It felt too much .NET-y and too much MicroSoft-y. And back then .net for linux had just been released and was somewhat unpolished.

It seemed that I had to learn C# in order to use F# properly and it seemed that porting it to C# was the saner option. I went with Rust after all and it seems to have been the right choice.

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airstrike ◴[01 Apr 25 16:19 UTC] No.43548583[source]▶
This rings true to me as well. I'm not sure what I get out of F# that I can't get from Rust, unless you specifically want .NET, which I don't.
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DeathArrow ◴[02 Apr 25 15:16 UTC] No.43557637[source]▶
You get speed of development, productivity, lots of libraries. You get something that is easy to learn and understand.
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1. airstrike ◴[02 Apr 25 15:28 UTC] No.43557782[source]▶
Lots of libraries if you want .NET, right? But if you don't, Rust has way more libraries

Speed of development is debatable. I think you can be pretty fast with both.

Easy to learn I concede but it gets easier with time, until it becomes very easy

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2. loxs ◴[05 Apr 25 09:04 UTC] No.43592030[source]▶
Having written a moderately big project in OCaml which I tried porting to F# and later did port to Rust, to me Rust feels much faster to develop than either OCaml or F#, especially once you figure out the "core", adding more features is a breeze. Refactoring is also easier. Not to mention that reading Rust is much easier than reading OCaml and coming back to the project after a year feels very easy. I think that I have less bugs with Rust than with OCaml. And the end product's core ended up being ~3-4 times faster to execute in Rust.