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Comment by codeape | Hacker News Reader

Is it still based on .NET/mono?

There is some talk of porting it to the JVM or LLVM

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/expert-panel-discussion...

F# already runs on Mono and is open source. Seems like it's not the case. Very interesting. There's a mention of "independent".

I don't think this is any technical change. Instead MS just got bored with F# and gives it a non-profit ("F# foundation") for maintenance. So it will be independent, ie. not affiliated with MS.

The F# Foundation is an initiative from the F# community to promote F# as an independent, open source language across multiple platforms. You're right this is not a technical change and the foundation is independent.

MS is not abandoning F#. This is a community-led effort to try to increase adoption of an excellent language and to create a better experience on non-microsoft platforms.

Not yet.

This is a community activity in addition to what Microsoft is doing

That's not quite right. A choice quote from the kick-off call today helps explain more about what's going on here: "Some customers require Microsoft support in order to adopt a technology; some customers require community (non-Microsoft) support in order to adopt a technology."

You can think of the F# Software Foundation as the community side of that equation and, well, Microsoft as the Microsoft side of that equation.

F# has been open source for quite a while. I'm guessing they are seeing some resistance to adoption due to the affiliation with Microsoft. They've always been quite independent, compared to the C# team, so I wonder what this even means. Porting to LLVM and/or JVM would be wonderful for the language though, it really is up there with Clojure as one of the more exciting functional languages under development.

I haven't been tracking Mono-related news for a while, but didn't they abandon this project? Did it ever work well?

Who is "they"? Mono was transferred from Novell to Xamarin some time ago, but is alive and well (better than ever?): http://mono-project.com/Main_Page.

See above - Xamarin are big contributors to mono. They have 190,000 developers and 10,000 customers already http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/11/08/xamarin-evolve-2013-our-f...

so mono's future looks secure now

Xamarin are booming (they are a cross-platform, open-source-based development tools company who are big contributors to mono). 190,000 developers and 10,000 customers already http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/11/08/xamarin-evolve-2013-our-f...

So mono's future is secured - Android, iPhone, iOS, OS X, linux, windows 8, ... no other high-level-to-native tools get this reach and none based on a language as c# (so much better than java). F# looks like nice added sauce to this.

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