September 17, 2008
The Microsoft F# research team recently released the September 2008 CTP of F#.
F# developed as a research programming language to provide the much sought-after combination of type safety, succinctness, performance, expresivity and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. This combination has been so successful that the language is now being transitioned towards a fully supported language on the .NET platform. Some of the reasons for this move are that F# gives you:
- succinct, type-inferred functional programming,
- interactive scripting like Python and other languages,
- the foundations for an interactive data visualization environment,
- the strong type inference and safety of ML,
- a cross-compiling compatible core shared with the popular OCaml language,
- a performance profile like that of C#,
- easy access to the entire range of powerful .NET libraries and database tools,
- a foundational simplicity with similar roots to Scheme,
- the option of a top-rate Visual Studio integration, which is usable with the freely available Visual Studio 2008 Shell
- the experience of a first-class team of language researchers with a track record of delivering high-quality implementations,
- the speed of native code execution on the concurrent, portable, and distributed .NET Framework.
You can download it here.
