> I think a lot of what people actually like about Rust, to be honest, is that it's essentially an ML language masquerading as a C-like, with a stellar packaging and tooling story.
F#is not C like and it's tooling and packaging is not as good as rust. Last time I checked it had multiple packaging solutions like paket and nuget. The tooling on vscode can be buggy
Yes F# has come along for the ride with modern .NET and it's as cross-platform as C# is. However, a lot of the really shiny .NET stuff is tooled up mostly for C# users, so it can be a challenge if you wanted to do something like a .NET MAUI (cross-platform GUI library) application in F# because the tooling and the content out there to teach you about it assumes C#.
F# can usually handle C# things - they put a lot of work into ensuring interop with new C# features - but the languages are from different paradigms so it is sometimes a bit awkward despite F#'s comprehensive OO support.
Personally I struggle a bit with F# because it doesn't have typeclasses, and a language that looks that much like Haskell but doesn't have typeclasses just feels weird to me.
Although it might get them... C# are looking at adding a traits-type feature (they don't seem to know what to call it yet, but the design's been kicking around the language team for ages now and keeps getting discussed), so F# could presumably piggyback on that if they wanted.
> C# are looking at adding a traits-type feature (they don't seem to know what to call it yet, but the design's been kicking around the language team for ages now and keeps getting discussed)
I'm in a startup using .NET. We deploy to a variety of targets including AWS t4g (Arm64) instances in AWS as well as x86/64 targets in GCP. All devs are on M1 Macs. Our build pipeline is GitHub Actions Linux runners. Our DB is either AWS RDS Postgres or GCP Cloud SQL Postgres with a mix of EF Core as ORM and Dapper (for more complex read queries).
C# has, over the years, converged with TypeScript so they are very similar[0] (though no Duck typing in C#). Good mix of OOP and FP paradigms borrowed from F#. F# interoperates with C# so it can tap into the larger C# ecosystem.
It's a good platform; very productive. CLI has a functional hot reload (much more limited than Node on JS as the granularity of module replacement isn't quite as good).
