Is there any reason for new people to come into the language? I feel F# has inherited all the disadvantages of dotnet and functional programming which makes it less approachable for people not familiar with either. Also, it has no clear use case. Ocaml is great if you want native binaries like Go, but F# has no clear advantages. It's neither completely null safe like OCAML, not has a flexible object system like C#

I've been programming F# for almost 10 years and I'm enjoying it a lot.

However lately, I occasionally do some vibe coding using AI and have figured out that LLM models are not particularly good at generating F# code. So I ask the AI to generate the project in either Python or TypeScript.

Which I'm not enjoying as much as I would, if the code had been written in F#. But at least AI manages to get the work done without too many hassles.

So now I'm wondering, can F# survive the AI era? Consequently, can it survive at all?
I don't think I could easily (at this moment) recommend F# to a friend trying to learn a new programming language, if I know that they won't have a good experience due to lacking AI support (no matter how great F# is as a language) compared to more popular languages.

Link

It is, of course, the 4th most important one, after C# (most loved), VB (really?) and C++ (hip?).

People still use ancient 'C' for real programming and other oddities like lisp. Are these languages still useful? Is F# at least a relevant as they are?

Let's all get real. F# had more attention and support from Microsoft when it was first released but that doesn't change our ability to use and enjoy it. If F# was Microsoft's no. 1 language would we all like that? C# has that joy.

I'm pretty sure that F# has a long future ahead of it and it seems ideally suited for it's primary purpose: developing interesting, relevant and powerful libraries in a functional language directly supported by a major IT company.

Where are the largest community of software Engineers: on the jvm. Where do you find the best frameworks and libraries: on the jvm. What os does the jvm users prefer: Linux and osx

Solution: Build an Fsharp jvm compiler and make sure that tooling support works excellent on Linux and osx

I'm probably getting downvoted for this post but as I see it MS does not set fsharp as super prioritised and jet brains don't belive in fsharp and since they have a reason to do good market research they are probably right currently. To prove them otherwise I think it would be wise to follow the path of scala and build a community around the jvm. To be able to tap into to the vast amount of high quality libraries on the jvm would attract a lot more developers and then grow the community.

I would love for fsharp to survive but since no company is pushing it the community around it has to grow a lot and the jvm community is huge and would like a language like fsharp.

Don't just downvote. Prove me wrong :-)

Edit: Thanks for all replies. I think it is important to challenge the current direction from time to time. Maybe the compile to jvm wont fly for some reason. But making Fsharp with .NET core super first class citizen on OSX and Linux might be the recipe for success. If you could easily write Linux UI apps in FSHarp.. easy to deploy .. easy to write shell scripts with a shebang on top.. then that might attract more people to the language and the .net platform

Hey guys, so I’ve been messing around with f# and while I’m impressed with some of the tooling and language aspects it appears that many libraries are still non .net core.

anyone know what or when some of these issues will get ironed out? What’s the deal with having so many runtimes and wonky issues that make the experience terrible?

If F# is meant to grow and flourish, maybe the powers that be should dedicate to working on and focusing on .NET Core rather than the other closed runtimes. The war of MSFT versus open source has long been lost and it’s time to gain popularity on people running non windows servers (which is 90%+ of the market).

open System
let addOneMoreApple x = 
     x.ToString() + " Number of Apples"

let doSomething f x =
   let y = f (x +1)
   "hello" + y

[<EntryPoint>] let main argv = 
    printfn "Hello World from F#!" 
    printfn "%s" (doSomething addOneMoreApple 22) 
    //let abc =doSomething addOneMoreApple 0 
    // return an integer exit code
    0

"f" is an function which be called on doSomething . "f" requires an int variable . So I have defined addOneMoreApple which has an int argument.

How can i pass addOneMoreApple with int argument ?

Edit : Based on comment by The_Mystic , I have posted entire code and rearranged it . How can i call doSomething in main method?

Edit 2 : debugnik fixes to the program has been added . Error message on 22 with red squiggly says that " "This expression was expected to have type 'int' -> 'a' but here has type 'int'""

I could not find the direct API for fsharp.
I want to convert code below from csharp to fsharp.
http://docs.go-mono.com/?link=T%3aGtk.TreeView

Opinion,

So first the good F# is perfect language.
But then,
No integration with any GUI library be it GTK or QT6.
Developing a web application, only API's for persons who understand quantum mechanics. Nothing simple
Language server. None works on FreeBSD.
So good theory, nice, but applicable not.

I wonder what AI currently generates the best code for F# in VSCode? Most obvious answer would be the Microsoft AI, because both are from Microsoft.

Does someone has any experience with different AI's?

I've spent the last months building Jern, a coding agent where the rules are enforced by the runtime instead of suggested to the model. The agent itself is about 300 lines in a small Kernel-style Lisp the host evaluates; everything it touches goes through effect handlers, and the policy handler sits between every tool call and the file system, the shell, and the network. The host, the CLI, the policy engine, and the whole cloud control plane are F#.

Things F# people might find interesting:

• The policy is a JSON file in the repository. edits_within, protected_paths, a blast radius in files and lines, the shell commands allowed without asking. The runtime refuses anything outside it; there is no path around the check.

• The agent is replayable. Every LLM exchange is recorded, and jern test replays the recording, so a changed system prompt fails a test the same way a changed function would.

• The cloud runs each attempt on its own Fly machine, created and destroyed per attempt, with Suave for the API and Npgsql for the store. No Entity Framework, no ORM, and the migration is one idempotent script that runs on start.

• Every pull request the agent opens carries a receipt as a check: tokens against cap, files against the blast radius, hosts contacted, and a digest of the encrypted trace.

Runtime (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/jern-ai/jern A real run on the demo repository, with the receipt on the pull request: https://github.com/jern-ai/jern-demo/pull/78

Happy to go into the handler design or the F# choices in the comments. The hosted version is at https://jern.ai, but the runtime runs on a laptop against Anthropic, OpenAI, or Ollama.

I'd like to ./ my F# scripts in Mac OS X. Which shebang line should I use? Is there one generalizable to both Mac OS X and Linux?

Hello is there a way to decompile F# into F# source code? I'm using ILSPy but it gives me very weird C#.

After writing a lot of test code using tuples to make the code more compact i have come to the conclusion that it would be nice to have a better syntax for extracting the elements. Ex: scala has ._X where X is the index of the tuple. https://docs.scala-lang.org/tour/tuples.html

let x = (1,2)

let y = x._1 + x._2

That is much nicer than the syntax used for pairs in F#

let x = (1,2)

let y = (fst x) + (snd x)

What do you think?