Microsoft gives F# an Apache 2.0 boost with code drop

Microsoft’s shy and retiring approach to its respected F# language has disappointed some developers, but yesterday it got a gentle bump in the right direction with the company announcing a code drop under the Apache 2.0 licence. The software vendor slotted its new F# language into Visual Studio 2010 in March this year. Now …

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops I did it again

Microsoft usually open sources stuff it doesn't care about anymore, e.g. DLR, dynamic languages, F#, etc.

As an F# developer, this doesn't inspire me to put a lot of effort in this language anymore. Time to look at what Scala is all about.

[Tim Parker]

Developers

"As an F# developer"

..that neatly answers my question, "Does anybody actually use F# ?" :) I've heard a bit of press about it from time to time (including as part of a series on influential programming languages !) - but not about any real world adopters. I'd be interested in hearing from others as to it's uptake.

"Time to look at what Scala is all about"

To it's credit, it's been going for nearly 10 years and doesn't have any sign of disappearing any time soon - so hopefully, if nothing else, it might make you feel a little more secure in it's longevity.

[Michael Wojcik]

Yes, some people use F#

I saw a presentation not long ago from a CIO in a large insurance firm; they'd recently migrated some core apps to F#. Got a huge performance boost too. (For the usual reason: some abstractions are more convenient to implement in a dynamic, functional language, so certain classes of problems can be easily addressed with more efficient algorithms.)

ML variants (F#, OCaml, etc) have been around a long time, and they have a market. Mostly it's in scientific and numerical applications, research, etc, but they're well-suited to some business apps.

[Richard 33]

OCaml has always been open source

That's where the best F# ideas came from. OCaml has been open source and around in one form since 1985. Still welcome to the party Microsoft, glad you could join us after 25 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

ocaml

F# interoperates better with .NET than ocaml though.

[Tom 7]

F# interoperates better with .NET than ocaml though.

You make that sound like a good thing.

In open source terms that means 'MS will wait until your company relies on it and then ask for some money, all of your money.'

[Mike Forsyth]

F# Real World Usage

Primary areas of real world use are in financial analysis and bioinformatics - it can also be used, since it is a full .NET language, as part of any .NET system where parallelism can be exploited in a module as it can take advantage of multicore processors

Never really going to have the impact that C# has, but a great language to work in all the same

[JDX]

no title

Because MS charge for .NET of course. They have never charged developers have they... sure the tools cost but you don't have to use the IDEs and these days they are providing more free tools not less.

The worry with F# is not that it's tied to .NET, but that it might be dropped completely. However if they fully open-source it, couldn't the community keep it active against current .NET versions?