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Comment by candl | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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