Book Image

Mastering F#

By : Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad
Book Image

Mastering F#

By: Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad

Overview of this book

F# is a multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and is supported both by industry-leading companies who provide professional tools and by an active open community, F# is rapidly gaining popularity as it emerges in digital music advertising, creating music-focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web. This book will guide you through the basics and will then help you master F#. The book starts by explaining how to use F# with Visual Studio, file ordering, and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage. It moves on to explain the functional core of F# such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, and lazy evaluation. Next, the book takes you through imperative and asynchronous programming, F# type providers, applications, and testing in F#. Finally, we look into using F# with distributed programming and using F# as a suitable language for data science. In short, this book will help you learn F# for real-world applications and increase your productivity with functional programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 8. Application Development in F#

One of the most recurrent sentences of the F# advocates is that F# is not only for data science. However, until recently it was difficult to write a full application, including the graphical user interface (GUI), using only F#. Besides being restricted to Windows platforms, F# support has been lagging behind C# for many years. As we will soon see, this situation has happily changed thanks to Fable and GitHub Electron, which allows us to easily create cross-platform apps entirely written in F#. Moreover, Xamarin also has a long story of F# support for mobile apps in Android and iOS.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is the GitHub Electron project, and how can we use it to write cross-platform desktop applications, such as OS X, Linux, and Windows, reusing our web technology's knowledge?
  • Microsoft has stated it will support the development of Universal Windows Platform applications in F#. However, this is still not complete at the...