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I've tried to get started with F# on Mac twice, once a few months ago, and 18 months before that. Could not get it working. When the official getting started

I've tried to get started with F# on Mac twice, once a few months ago, and 18 months before that. Could not get it working. When the official getting started guides don't work, that is a very bad sign. I will be staying away.

pianoben 5y ago
It's regrettable, but F# has never seen anything like the kind of support C# and VB.NET have. It was and remains something of a "hobby" product, albeit one that sees lots of use in some specialized industries. Although F#-the-language is top-notch, the surrounding bits - editor experience, documentation, libraries, tooling - just don't get the investment they need to be on par with the sibling languages. What I mean to say is, don't judge .NET just by your experience with F#. C# is the happy path.
paranoidrobot 5y ago
When people talk about .NET, they're mostly always talking about C#. Sure, there's a bunch of other languages that run on the CLR - but for the most part, the broadest, most well tested, path is doing stuff in C#.
manigandham 5y ago
What was the error? Also like the others say, F# on dotnet is like Groovy for the JVM. It's nowhere near the popularity. Any reason you didn't try C# instead?
- xbar 5y ago
  It seems like you understand the story for both of them. Any reason why F# is not a valid starting point language on Mac?
  - oblio 5y ago
    Because it's a community language. Microsoft doesn't officially support it fully. So you have 20-30 or however many volunteer devs (probably fewer) working on it in their spare time. If you're just getting used to the platform, you're shooting yourself in the foot by going with niche setups. Try C# first to figure out your way around the platform and then branch out, not the other way around.
    - nojito 5y ago
      >Microsoft doesn't officially support it fully. Nonsense all you have to do is install the dotnet sdk and run a single line in your terminal. dotnet new console -lang "F#" -o "project"
      - oblio 5y ago
        Yeah, it's also included in VS classic, if you want to get super fancy. Does it get the same level of support as C#? Hardly. Do bugs get fixed as fast? Maybe. I think there was a Microsoft article that summed it up nicely: there are millions of C# developers (ergo the focus), tens of thousands if not low hundreds of thousands of VB.Net developers (ergo the life support) and maybe hundreds or low thousands of F# developers (ergo the fact that Microsoft offers some integration points but expects the already small community to develop and polish the actual implementation). It took F# several years to fully get supported on .NET Core (type providers and such). I know, because I was watching the Github issue for it for at least 2 years).
  - Multicomp 5y ago
    It's valid, just clunky to get going the first time. F# dev team is only ~7 people at MS, the rest is community supported projects and github issues. So while F# devs measure in the 10,000s, C# devs measure in the 100,000s
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    It is. The OP was likely confused with a tool or had a specialized use case tied to Windows that they're not communicating. All the official guides for getting started work. Using specialized tools or components meant for Windows development (e.g., Type Providers not ported to support .NET Core)on a different OS may not work so well.
andix 5y ago
That's weird. I just tried the minimal example on alpine, and it works right out of the box. Installing .NET 5 should be easy on macOS as they even provide an installer. # Start fresh alpine docker run -it alpine # install tools and .NET 5.0 apk update && apk add wget bash vim icu-libs krb5-libs libgcc libintl libssl1.1 libstdc++ zlib wget https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/21fdb75c-4eb5-476d-a8b8-1d096e4b7b14/c1f853410a58713cf5a56518ceeb87e8/dotnet-sdk-5.0.202-linux-musl-x64.tar.gz mkdir -p $HOME/dotnet && tar zxf dotnet-sdk-5.0.202-linux-musl-x64.tar.gz -C $HOME/dotnet export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/dotnet export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/dotnet # create f# project mkdir my-fsharp-demo && cd my-fsharp-demo dotnet new console -lang f# # run project, it will show "Hello world from F#" dotnet run Or did you have issues with the IDE?

pianoben 5y ago

It's regrettable, but F# has never seen anything like the kind of support C# and VB.NET have. It was and remains something of a "hobby" product, albeit one that sees lots of use in some specialized industries. Although F#-the-language is top-notch, the surrounding bits - editor experience, documentation, libraries, tooling - just don't get the investment they need to be on par with the sibling languages. What I mean to say is, don't judge .NET just by your experience with F#. C# is the happy path.

paranoidrobot 5y ago

When people talk about .NET, they're mostly always talking about C#. Sure, there's a bunch of other languages that run on the CLR - but for the most part, the broadest, most well tested, path is doing stuff in C#.

manigandham 5y ago

What was the error? Also like the others say, F# on dotnet is like Groovy for the JVM. It's nowhere near the popularity. Any reason you didn't try C# instead?

xbar 5y ago
It seems like you understand the story for both of them. Any reason why F# is not a valid starting point language on Mac?
- oblio 5y ago
  Because it's a community language. Microsoft doesn't officially support it fully. So you have 20-30 or however many volunteer devs (probably fewer) working on it in their spare time. If you're just getting used to the platform, you're shooting yourself in the foot by going with niche setups. Try C# first to figure out your way around the platform and then branch out, not the other way around.
  - nojito 5y ago
    >Microsoft doesn't officially support it fully. Nonsense all you have to do is install the dotnet sdk and run a single line in your terminal. dotnet new console -lang "F#" -o "project"
    - oblio 5y ago
      Yeah, it's also included in VS classic, if you want to get super fancy. Does it get the same level of support as C#? Hardly. Do bugs get fixed as fast? Maybe. I think there was a Microsoft article that summed it up nicely: there are millions of C# developers (ergo the focus), tens of thousands if not low hundreds of thousands of VB.Net developers (ergo the life support) and maybe hundreds or low thousands of F# developers (ergo the fact that Microsoft offers some integration points but expects the already small community to develop and polish the actual implementation). It took F# several years to fully get supported on .NET Core (type providers and such). I know, because I was watching the Github issue for it for at least 2 years).
- Multicomp 5y ago
  It's valid, just clunky to get going the first time. F# dev team is only ~7 people at MS, the rest is community supported projects and github issues. So while F# devs measure in the 10,000s, C# devs measure in the 100,000s
- phillipcarter 5y ago
  It is. The OP was likely confused with a tool or had a specialized use case tied to Windows that they're not communicating. All the official guides for getting started work. Using specialized tools or components meant for Windows development (e.g., Type Providers not ported to support .NET Core)on a different OS may not work so well.

andix 5y ago

That's weird. I just tried the minimal example on alpine, and it works right out of the box. Installing .NET 5 should be easy on macOS as they even provide an installer. # Start fresh alpine docker run -it alpine # install tools and .NET 5.0 apk update && apk add wget bash vim icu-libs krb5-libs libgcc libintl libssl1.1 libstdc++ zlib wget https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/21fdb75c-4eb5-476d-a8b8-1d096e4b7b14/c1f853410a58713cf5a56518ceeb87e8/dotnet-sdk-5.0.202-linux-musl-x64.tar.gz mkdir -p $HOME/dotnet && tar zxf dotnet-sdk-5.0.202-linux-musl-x64.tar.gz -C $HOME/dotnet export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/dotnet export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/dotnet # create f# project mkdir my-fsharp-demo && cd my-fsharp-demo dotnet new console -lang f# # run project, it will show "Hello world from F#" dotnet run Or did you have issues with the IDE?