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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see a big enough advantage compared to its parent, Ocaml. Partly because I wouldn't count Visual Studio and .net on the "pro" side. Ocaml is basically the same language, you don't have a big methodology mismatch when using libraries, it produces smaller executables that are quite fast, its runtime has some advantages if I remember correctly. (And there's the evangelist problem, but let's not get into that again.)

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I doubt they're hoping to get people to convert from Ocaml to F#. But .Net has a huge dev base, and this is a great opportunity for functional programming to go (more) mainstream.

F# is a somewhat simpler language than OCaml. Plus, it has decent concurrency support (which is a bit of an issue for OCaml if I recall correctly).

Does F# have functor support by now? Because if that's what's meant by simpler, I'd rather have a bit of complexity. If I program in a functional, symbolic manner, I also don't want to kowtow to the runtime that just wasn't made for such an use (If I recall correctly, Yaron Minsky of Jane Street complained somewhat about F#'s allocation rate in this respect).

Concurrency is an issue that I hope the Ocaml developers will address a bit more, though.

No functor support. Questionable if it would fit idiomatically with .net framework culture but not something you miss.

In order of wish list to F#:

   - ability to create a structure isomorphic to GADTS
   - further enhancements to metaprogramming and how it does quasi quotation stuff
   - Support for Higher Kinds

The above would ameliorate the need for functors too, I feel.

I don't know that .net is necessarily not tuned for that use-case. Generally, a generational garbage collector like .net's handles short-lived immutable objects better than it does longer-lived mutable objects. It can allocate and deallocate objects very quickly as long as they're collected in the first generation. I'm speaking mostly in generalities though. I'd be curious to know if this isn't the case on .net.

Multicore is one obvious huge advantage over OCaml. Associating basic functions (like comparison) with types is a major advantage. Equality types are a huge advantage. Overloading and associated benefits like support for the full range of primitive types is another important advantage.

Also, F# executables tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than OCaml executables but, of course, the F# ones need a CLR installed to run them.

"its runtime has some advantages"

Could someone shed some light on this?

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