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by mjt0229 4864 days ago
I have been hoping to pick up some F# with Mono, but I'm having a hard time getting started - not with the language itself, but with the development environment. For instance, MonoDevelop seems very flakey on the Mac. I'd love to try out FsharpX, but I can't find instructions for how to build or install it on Mono.

Can you make any suggestions as to places to read up on this stuff? The language seems so well put together!
2 comments
rjzzleep 4863 days ago
well, personally i use monodevelop(xamarinstudio) 4.0 and mono 3.0.3 in archlinux.

you need a fork of the fsharpbindings project https://github.com/xamarin/fsharpbinding

have you tried using fsharpx from nuget? monodevelop has nuget support as of now. https://github.com/squidge/monodevelop-nuget-addin/tree/xs-n...

I also just built fsharpx.core and fsharpx.http with monodevelop(right now) and it built fine for me.

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mjt0229 4863 days ago
MonoDevelop 4? I'm using 3.0.3, which seems to be what their website advertises as the latest version. Maybe I'm missing it. Should I be building from source?
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rjzzleep 4863 days ago
up to you really they released 4.0

http://monodevelop.com/Download

it looks a little prettier, but besides that nothing has really caught my attention. it also seems to throw exceptions more frequently(throwing exceptions, not crashing)

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boothead 4863 days ago
I've spent about 3hrs trying to get the fsharp binding working in xamarin studio but no luck. How did you get it working?
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smosher 4864 days ago
Regarding MonoDevelop, it never worked for me on Linux, it just flaked out completely.

If you don't need .Net, OCaml is practically the same language and has lots of vim/emacs support.

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profquail 4863 days ago
When was the last time you tried MonoDevelop? Xamarin has put in a lot of work on MonoDevelop over the past year or so -- in fact, they just released a major new version (4.0) and even contributed a bunch of improvements to the F# bindings:

https://github.com/mono/monodevelop https://github.com/xamarin/fsharpbinding

BTW, F# also has emacs support, and from what I hear vim support is on the way:

https://github.com/fsharp/fsharpbinding

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smosher 4863 days ago
It would have been over a year ago. I am not interested in using it, I was just curious about it at the time. (I don't really get along well with anything that expects me to use a mouse.)

I sorta doubt that the emacs/vim support is anything near what there is for OCaml, but knowing Xamarin it will get there... eventually. But really, I don't see a big reason to pick F# over OCaml unless you're already doing .Net or something.

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