What areas of code are you using f# for? [closed]

Answer 1

Program analysis and transformation.

Answer 2

Parsing with FParsec (a port-in-spirit of Haskell's Parsec)

Answer 3

I'm currently using F# to develop my next indie video game. So far I'm finding that my normal OO approach is different from how I develop in c#.

Some good things I've noticed is that I'm using smaller functions on average ie the number of lines per function is way down. It's also more natural now for me to scope a static private member function to be inside of another member instead of having it be exposed to everything in the object. Writing a collision algorithm was really easy. It's a bit early for me to say that writing algorithms in F# is easier but I'm already leaning that way.

Not everything has been roses since I started using F#. I'm still finding online documentation lacking. Expert F# has been of some help but since it skims over OO it leaves me lost a lot of times. It gets on my nerves that the author chose not to go very deep into OO when it's currently the most popular form of development. I'm not looking to dump OO. I'm looking to integrate functional into it.

The biggest advantage I've seen so far has been my codes correctness. I know it sounds funny but every time I've gotten my code to compile, it has worked as expected. I hope this is still the case when I break the ten thousand lines of code mark.

Answer 4

Deep Fried Bytes #24 podcast covered this:

• Algorithmic processing (including calculations)
• DSL creation
• Concurrent processing (immutable data, message queuing, asynchronous workflows)

And of course, for many systems F# may form a processing core, but it seems to me that it will more often than not be wrapped (interface, user or otherwise) with C#/VB to provide a conventional interface.

Answer 5

1) Simulations (Ants and Mycelium)

It's easy to leverage async workflows to make for massively parallel simulations.

2) Unit Tests for C# API

F# makes for short, sweet and very readable tests. Also, FsStory is quite nice.

3) Data Analysis and Visualization

It has great visualization libraries and it's very fast to try different things out. I also love VSLab and hope it sees another release soon.

4) Rapid XNA Development

Once you have a small framework set up to keep the object-orientedness of XNA at bay, F# development is much faster and also much easier to experiment with.

In short, I find F# to be fantastic anywhere development speed or immutability trumps API correctness. If there was a pragma or compiler flag to turn off type inference for public functions and type definitions, I'd probably be pushing to use it for my APIs as well.

Answer 6

I currently explore the uses of F# in

• SOA
• Parallel execution
• Data Intensive
• Long running processes