[himaraya]

> I looked at F# for a bit, too, but it comes across as having too much .NET/Microsoft flavour for me.

Mind elaborating? F# seems like a decent fit from what you've said. I'm hoping the language will grow less stagnant as .NET Core matures.

[atombender]

I'm a big fan F# the language. It comes across very as a modern, cleaned-up version of OCaml — F# started out as an implementation OCaml, after all — with some very interesting innovations.

However, it comes with the baggage of .NET Core, which is a rather big thing. And it's growing, as Microsoft is apparently porting over everything from the older, non-cross-platform .NET stuff. For one, .NET Core includes the CLR/CIL, i.e. the JIT VM and cross-language integration, which I'm not interested in at all; I just want an AOT compiler. The AOT support seems like a fairly recent addition, and it's unclear to me how optimized it is or how well-supported it is compared to the older CLR-based toolchain. As a standard library, CoreFX seems rather large, and contains things like GUI and SQL Server support, for some reason.

In short, .NET Core seems like something you'd love only if you were already heavily invested in Microsoft's tech stack. I'm not interested in it myself.

[himaraya]

I see -- most complaints I've heard about .NET Core relate to F#'s status as a second-class citizen vis a vis compatibility problems, which have recently resolved.

I'm with you on AOT, but I think the language makes more sense if you understand it as a .NET port of OCaml. If you isolated F# from CLR, you'd lose libraries and tooling, arguably F#'s raison d'etre, pleasant design choices aside.