Disclaimer: I've only used it for small Todo project, I'm not a front end guy.
Disdisclaimer: I've not used React at all.
However, if you need really strong JS interop, consider something like F#'s Fable. F# is gaining a lot of momentum and now that SAFE stack is apparently Microsoft-blessed, I expect it to continue growing even more.
Suave though... Nothing against Suave, but it's not the Phoenix competitor the ecosystem is in dire need of. I was under the impression some newer frameworks like Giraffe were going to fill that void..
* "Official" Cross platform support -> dotnet core FTW!
* Cross-IDE intellisense support -> Ionide, Check!
* Dotnet core support -> Check, finally(and make sure to set Ionide to use core)!
* F# to javascript cross compilation project with some traction -> Fable, check(Fable needs serious documentation help though)!
* A great framework competing head on with Phoenix -> Hopefully soon :)
The potential just seems sooo massive. Hopefully it blows up quicker than Haskell ;)
Rider also works pretty well with F#, which is nice if you prefer the JetBrains IDEs.
?
It's what the S in safe is actually meant to be, not suave. It's very similar, in heart anyways, to phoenix.
The fsharp community is fighting what is essentially an uphill battle. We have ML but we've got to jump through dotnet hoops to get shit done.
One man's cruft is another man's feature.
I doubt ionide will support SAFE, but maybe they will have a sister plugin? Idk how all that works.
Ionide could just use some extra help I mean; it appears to be the work of just one guy. Hopefully with the increased interested in F# web development it will get some extra love more ala omnisharp.
Things like limitations on statically resolved type parameters being supported only for inline functions, etc. don't make sense for a language targeting javascript.
It is interesting to note that F# took a lot of concepts from OCaml but stripped out functors, structural typing support etc. to adapt to dotnet. These adaptations are largely required because Microsoft does not treat F# as a first class citizen (at the same level as C#) and CLR is very explicitly geared towards object oriented languages. An occasional endorsement from Microsoft does not magically obliviate these deeply ingrained design decisions in F#.
When targeting javascript these adaptions become really pointless. As demonstrated by Microsoft's own TypeScript language, Structural typing can be quite useful for interop.
It would be really nice if F# was a first class citizen in dotnet world and javascript was a first class compilation target maintained by the F# core team adapting the language to javascript target in the same way it currently adapts to dotnet. However that is not the present day reality. However typescript, despite being a javascript superset (and inheriting all its warts) has a really flexible type system and lends itself well to functional programming (as demonstrated by Giulio Canti's fp-ts [1] project).
Unlike ReasonML, however, typescript's type system is not sound. I have written a more detailed comparision [2] of TS and ReasonML. I do actively use TypeScript for my day job and mostly love it, but I am much more optimistic about ReasonML once the ecosystem matures.
tl;dr: The 80% best practices parity between ReasonML and modern functional javascript which the "What & Why" page of official documentation [3] talks about, does not exactly hold true for F#. So, while it is not that F# is not a great language, or that you can't build great apps with F#, however, as it currently stands, I don't see any compelling advantages of preferring F# over ReasonML, unless your backend is also F# and you want to (and can) share code between frontend and backend.
My familiarity with both F# and ReasonML is quite early stage (a few weeks each) and so would welcome any corrections.
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[1] https://github.com/gcanti/fp-ts
[2] https://lorefnon.tech/2018/05/13/reasonml-vs-typescript-firs...
Also, to just jump in what your comment was actually about, I think the prospect of writing f# is generally a more friendly experience for those using it for the web. Or especially those using azure. Getting started with f# with ionide and vscode is literally the most pleasant onboarding I've experienced since ruby. It just goes! Amazing.
But yeah, I think reason is great too. I really like that ocaml has a centralized, external package management story. Using paket+fake isn't like a bad experience, and I mean, I wrote scala for a couple years, I can always find gratitude for a build tool of its NOT sbt, but it's awkward at times and feels like a bit more work than it should be. Of course from Microsoft's perspective, being able to jump around dotnet libs is a major boon.
You do web development primarily? I've been eyeballing TS lately, you think that's probsbly a better choice for more professional work until reasonml gets bigger pants to wear?
Pfft. Run reasonml/ocaml on node, one event loop pr core, and use message passing for synchronisation / distributing work ;-)
I'm only half-joking.
I do think that upcoming multicore support in OCaml is very exciting. I am more optimistic that it will attract people from Golang and C++. F# developers coming from outside dotnet is just too small a cohort.
> Getting started with f# with ionide and vscode is literally the most pleasant onboarding I've experienced since ruby.
Yeah, Ionide is really amazing. However merlin has also worked pretty well for me so far, and the emacs integration is a big plus for me. YMMV.
Also my comment was more around frontend use cases (compile to JS). I wouldn't be surprised if F# shines wrt Azure integration and within the dotnet ecosystem.
> You do web development primarily? I've been eyeballing TS lately, you think that's probsbly a better choice for more professional work until reasonml gets bigger pants to wear?
Yes, mostly node and frontend. In my area, professional work in reasonml is almost non-existent, but I do expect this to change in future.
As an developer coming from Ruby myself, glad to see more people from dynamic languages finding FP and type systems interesting.
Anyways, thanks!
The bulk of F# is functions acting on values modeled by types. This maps directly to JS. In the F# and .NET compatibility document[0], you'll note that all "core F#" components map directly to JS. And of course, you can consume JS libraries, TS definition files, etc. For example:
"The following F# semantic and syntactic features are also available:
* Records and Unions
* Structural Equality/Comparison
* Comprehensions (seq, array, list)
* Computation Expressions
* Pattern Matching
* Active Patterns
* Object Expressions
* Units of measure"
Do you have specific examples where F# semantics cannot map to JS such that the "80% rule" also does not hold?
[0]: fable.io/docs/compatibility.html
> Do you have specific examples where F# semantics cannot map to JS such that the "80% rule" also does not hold?
Yes, my comment was around some of the C# compatibility things, which don't make sense when compiling to other targets.
> Tuples vs struct tuples distinction.
> Having both modules and namespaces
> Explicit interfaces
> The strange coupling of SRTP and inlining
I find OCaml's support for structural typing in classes and polymorphism to be more flexible than the above.
In typed FP, runtime reflection is seldom used, and I believe reflection support (and associated overhead) should have to be explicitly opted in.
I also faced weird issues when tracing the source of an exception in an async workflow, and some incomprehensible errors around automatic generalization. But this was a long time back and I no longer have the full context. These may have since been addressed.
My intent was certainly not to criticise F#. It has been developed and is used by people far smarter than me. It is just that after a preliminary evaluation I have not found a strong reason to prefer Fable over bucklescript in the absence of a more deeper commitment to dotnet stack.
I am also really fond of many modern JS features like Module <-> Filepath 1:1 correlation, explicit imports, ES6 proxies, tagged template literals (placeholders etc.) which TypeScript elegantly inherits from JS. Support for intersection types in typescrpt is also very handy.