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

Comparing F# List to .NET List<T>


The List is similar to .NET List, because they both have indexes and the same methods as well, although the semantics are different.

The List is implemented as a single linked list, not as the List<T> in .NET BCL. This linked list implementation is faster than List<T>. The List can be stored recursively by easily using F# head::tail syntax.

A single linked list means that each element of the list contains a portion of property that points to the next element of the list, as illustrated here:

F# List is efficient and faster than List<T> in a sense that a single linked list always guarantees that any operations that access only the head of the list are O(1), and element access is O(n). It is ordered that each element can have a pointer to the next element.

The apparent advantages of F# List over .NET List<T> are as follows:

  • F# List is immutable. It can be considered as a persistent data structure when combining with List.

  • The nature...