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by hpstewed 1156 days ago
I use F# at work. Really love the language but the connection to the dotnet ecosystem is a curse as much as a blessing. Having to operate in a world of nulls and exceptions can reduce/nullify the amazing benefits of discriminated unions. Often you are back to relying on the due dilligence of other developers as a result.

I use a lot of rust in my spare time. The runtime guarantees it offers make other languages feel like a house of cards in comparison, including F#. I coincidentally picked up an ocaml book yesterday seeking a more 'robust' alternative to F#. Unfortunately it seems as though ocaml is even more niche than F# (I doubt I'll be working for jane street any time soon)
2 comments
ragnese 1156 days ago
> Having to operate in a world of nulls and exceptions can reduce/nullify the amazing benefits of discriminated unions.

I've been saying this about Kotlin on the JVM for ages. Using a Java dependency is an absolute last resort for me for those same reasons you mention about .NET from F#.

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WorldMaker 1156 days ago
The C# compiler got a ton of new smarts around reference type nullability and almost all of the BCL (.NET standard library) got annotated for it. I don't know when F# will finally pick up all the new compile-time smarts for Nullable Reference Types, but it has been proposed and prototyped, at least [1].

[1] https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-10...

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