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by StopDisinfo910 302 days ago
F# started as an Ocaml port to the CLR. In the end, they decided to port a subset of the language so you get mostly the same syntax, no parametrised modules which is a big part of Ocaml but in exchange you can call libraries from other languages using the CLR. Of course, that comes with the issue of being a second class citizen in the .Net family, albeit a very nice second class citizen.

F# have drifted a bit further since but not that much. It’s a nice language but it’s not really comparable to Ocaml at this point. At least, I don’t see many cases where people would have to chose one or the other. I think people know if they want the CLR or not.
1 comments
Syzygies 302 days ago
I make little use of .NET; my hand-coded atomic queue is faster than .NET work stealing for parallelism, for example. I like the slightly cleaner syntax and twice as fast for my applications.

I'm escaping the black hole of Haskell. If one can code in Chez Scheme, one can code without parametrized modules, as much as I admire them. And there are also F# additions OCaml could admire.

I held back for all of your reasons, and finally caved. I never saw myself in the .NET ecosystem, but prejudices are a funny thing.

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StopDisinfo910 301 days ago
> prejudices are a funny thing

I don’t think people have prejudices here. Ocaml is Ocaml and F# is F#.

If your point is that people using OCaml should instead use F#, I vehemently disagree. That would be losing most of what makes Ocaml actually Ocaml.

Still F# is a nice language. F# without using .Net library I don’t see the point however. It’s the most interesting part of the language.

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