Book Image

F# High Performance

By : Eriawan Kusumawardhono
Book Image

F# High Performance

By: Eriawan Kusumawardhono

Overview of this book

F# is a functional programming language and is used in enterprise applications that demand high performance. It has its own unique trait: it is a functional programming language and has OOP support at the same time. This book will help you make F# applications run faster with examples you can easily break down and take into your own work. You will be able to assess the performance of the program and identify bottlenecks. Beginning with a gentle overview of concurrency features in F#, you will get to know the advanced topics of concurrency optimizations in F#, such as F# message passing agent of MailboxProcessor and further interoperation with .NET TPL. Based on this knowledge, you will be able to enhance the performance optimizations when implementing and using other F# language features. The book also covers optimization techniques by using F# best practices and F# libraries. You will learn how the concepts of concurrency and parallel programming will help in improving the performance. With this, you would be able to take advantage of multi-core processors and track memory leaks, root causes, and CPU issues. Finally, you will be able to test their applications to achieve scalability.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
F# High Performance
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Managing side effects inside MailboxProcessor and asynchronous workflows


We may have been tempted to use a MailboxProcessor instantiation wrapped within an asynchronous workflow. It is not recommended to have this overly complex wrapper as MailboxProcessor already has its own asynchronous context.

This is also applied to interoperability with the UI thread as well as asynchronous context should not be mixed with the UI thread directly. Mixing the UI thread with asynchronous contexts will yield unpredictable results.

If we must use Windows forms, it is best to have asynchronous workflow and the UI coded in F#. Using WPF, we can use WPF Dispatcher to ensure we will not have cross-thread violation.

On managing side effects, using MailboxProcessor to do side effects activity must be handled carefully.

Consider these scenarios and the reasons:

  1. Upon receiving the messages inside the delegate parameter of a MailboxProcessor instantiation, we have calls to get web content asynchronously. These multiple...