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fsharp
fslang-design
F#2016–2026
fsharp / fslang-design

fslang-design

RFCs and docs related to the F# language design process, see https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions to submit ideas

Languages & CompilersLearning & Reference
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
12Distinct people
14Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
562GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

RFCs and docs related to the F# language design process, see https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions to submit ideas

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-11-24 08:49:20 UTC to 2026-04-08 23:53:04 UTC.

012342016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

14 sources
throw234234234·Apr 8, 2026
F# has since gotten Functional State machines which make many computation expressions more efficient (https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-6.0...). Been there a while. I actually think F# has received some "love" over the recent years contrary to some on this forum; that feature being an example. My view, maybe unpopular but in the age of AI maybe less so, is there is a diminishing returns to language features anyway w.r.t complexity and the use cases that new feature will actually apply for. F# in my mind and many other languages now for that matter is pretty much there or are almost there; the languages are converging. When I used F# I liked how it unified features and tried to keep things simple. Features didn't feel "tacked on" mostly with some later exceptions. Last time I used F# a few libraries started adopting
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this for their CE's (e.g. IcedTasks library, etc).
In Union types in C# 15
neonsunset·Apr 2, 2025
Read this first: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref... There are multiple alternate asynchronous computation expression implementations which give different ergonomics and behavior (like https://github.com/TheAngryByrd/IcedTasks). There's an entire CE extension to specifically enable this kind of convenience and flexibility too: https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-6.0... None of this is possible in C#, at least without jumping through many hoops and ending up with extra boilerplate (and this is okay, C# has enough of its own complexity). As cjbgkagh noted, providing this type of control is the whole point and what makes F# so powerful.
In Why F#?
smoothdeveloper·Dec 22, 2024
/!\ this is just my perspective /!\ > would love to know why leaving it unbounded was decided upon. Might be I don't quite grok the culture of F#. You may look at more context in the discussions pertaining to the RFC: https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-4.1... I think those are the main factors: * "Keep It Simple Stupid" principle * community pressure so that F# libraries could standardise on better things that Choice1Of2 = Ok and Choice2Of2 = Error, or using a bare tuple (which is very not clean for APIs) * F# ought to remain flexible in terms of not pretending of totally abstracting away the fact that most of the dotnet base class library or the overall dotnet ecosystem, uses exceptions, it is not like Result type was created to abstract runtime exceptions away. For all other needs, one is just one wrapper / or abst
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raction (for library that don't "meet our standards" in terms of exception safety) away, along with a bit of adhoc tooling around leveraging FSharp.Compiler.Service for sake of adding static analysis, for architecture astronauts, dealing with behemoth or safety critical codebases, requiring even more screws turned, but even there, F# (and so many other languages) may not meet the bar if those are the critical properties for a project involving code. Overall, F# is just pragmatic for the 99.99%, and not trying too hard beside the steady core language idioms, and how the organic community wants it over time, to satisfy hypothetical and intellectual pursuits of the highest abstraction and safety. The culture of F# is mostly about throwing productivity parties and being done with it (while not suffering so many of the wrong choices done by C, C++, Java and it's famed sibbling, C#), rather than the higher conceptual type theory perfection that (sometimes ?) lead to code that is not less kludgy, or easier to maintain, in the grand scheme, for the masses of developers, that are not yet expert in Haskell, Scala, etc. It is probably not too dissimilar to OCaml culture, while embracing some aspects that are familiar to more people, due to relationship with dotnet ecosystem.
In Fault Report – and alternative to Result in F#
neonsunset·Dec 3, 2024
Perhaps type providers? Sadly they didn't really take off, they work but remain a niche feature. At least I'm not aware if any other feature fits this description closer. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/ty... Or perhaps Computation Expressions? But those are an integral part of F# and one of the key reasons why it's so flexible and able to easily keep up in many areas with changes in C# - something that require bespoke compiler modification in C# is just another CE* in F# using its type system naturally. * with notable exception being "resumable code" which is the basis of task { } CE and similar: https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-6.0... If you want to get back to F#, it has gotten really easy to do it because .NET SDK is available in almost every distro repository (except Debian, sigh) - i
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.e. `brew install dotnet`/`sudo apt install dotnet9`. I have also posted a quick instruction on compiling F# scripts to native executables in a sibling comment: https://gist.github.com/neon-sunset/028937d82f2adaa6c1b93899...
In 8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)
shakna·Nov 25, 2024
I've written patches for F#. I do know what the hell I'm talking about. However, the compiler does not, has never, required that it does things via a different syntax. In fact, in the early branches before that was adopted, it didn't! The same behaviour was seen in those branches. This behaviour you expect, was never something that had to be. It was something chosen to simplify the needs of the optimiser, and in fact cut the size of code required in half. It was to reduce the amount of code needed to be maintained by the core team. And so 1087 [1] was accepted. So perhaps you might need to read more into the process of the why and how async was introduced into C# and F#. It was a maintenance team problem. It was a pragmatic approach for them - not something that was the only way that this became a possibility. As said, in the original bra
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nch for using tasks... > Having two different but similar ways of creating asynchronous computations would add some cognitive overhead (even now there are times when I am indecisive between using async or mailbox for certain parallelism/concurrency scenarios). [0] [0] https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/581 [1] https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-6.0...
In OCaml Syntax Sucks (2016)
enricosada·Nov 24, 2016
In the blog post that's an breakdown of ms project, yes. Used to show how ms is doing with open source? yes. because .net framework (and implementation of runtime,compiler/blc) was owned by ms (mono is another implementation of the runtime/compiler/bcl). But for some components is ok to contribute there: - mono(xamarin) was already migrating to use open source components like the bcl (corefx) after the initial open source of code by ms. It's like dont write two times the same stuff. - coreclr: the .net core runtime - corefx: the standard library (base class library like io etc), used by .net fw (win) and .net core and partially by mono - roslyn: that's the c#/vb compiler, also mono is trying to reuse that - cli: it's the sdk for building projects. Can the project system changed? yes, but not needed now (.net core it's boostrapping another
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xplat runtime so need tools). as a personal note, the cli team doesn an awesome job to make it easy to contribute and some notes: - asp.net is a web framework, it's used a lot, nice ppl contribute. who like servicestack/nancy/suave, use that instead. - fsharp (http://fsharp.org/) was and is already driven by community, and lang decision are in repo https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design by community and lead by @dsyme And you should also check dotnet foundation pulse and community projects (like Nancy/Nunit/Akka.net/mbrace). Lots of the work done by ms can be useful for others, see Kestrel server (damn fast) who can be used by other web projects like Suave (https://github.com/SuaveIO/suave is a lib, not a framework :D) - dnx was the predecessor of cli, and replaced by it (good job by aspnet team to boostrap xplat on netcore)
In Open Source .NET – 2 years later

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