FSharp 4.6 Github Release

[ShalokShalom]

Currently, there 4.6 is only published via this homepage and not for my distribution or for builds who use Mono as a dependency.

With F# 4.6, the compiler builds entirely with the .NET SDK, which leads to increased test coverage, a path towards F# Interactive support on .NET Core, and other nice, modern features. That is a good thing in the long term, but in the short term, it makes it difficult to keep it building from source on mono, which many packagers need to be able to do.
Please don't take this to say that it isn't happening, but that it's a non-trivial process to merge in the F# 4.6 enhancements, because the build process changed drastically. This will take time. @ninjarobot

[cartermp]

We do not own nor intend to own the Mono distribution for F# - that is tied to Mono. All non-binary distributes of .NET Core (and thus F#) use the .NET source build: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/build/

[ninjarobot]

You could take a look at this: baronfel#1

@baronfel is working to get a Makefile build for the F# compiler so we can build from source on more platforms. It's moving along, currently depending on an existing .NET SDK.

And to give you a little background on what we are trying to do, there are quite a few platforms where .NET Core doesn't run yet, and we'd like to provide F# there. The SDK and runtime are pretty complicated to build, and while Microsoft builds for many platforms, it pretty well must provide support for any platform it builds for. I am confident that in a few years, there will be community builds of .NET Core SDK and runtime that are well maintained, but they are currently very experimental because in the time it takes a handful of community contributors to port it to another platform, the build has often changed quite significantly for a new release. These changes will become smaller and more incremental and community contributors will be able to keep up, but that's probably a couple years (a few more releases) away.

In the meantime, we have mono, which is large and old enough that, even with some issues, it is ported to many, many platforms already, and updates are relatively small incremental changes. There are relatively recent versions in most distributions and I'm personally working to get the Gentoo ebuild overlay and FreeBSD port updated to the latest mono.

In between the .NET SDK that ships for limited platforms and the mono SDK that ships for many more, we have the msbuild fork that ships with mono. It's able to build new style SDK projects and target .NET Standard as well as .NET Framework / mono. Quite possibly this mono msbuild will be able to build the F# compiler from Chet's work that I linked above, and that's the goal for anywhere we would like to build and run F# that doesn't yet have .NET Core support.

The two paths for any platform are:

1. Port .NET Core - this is a really huge effort and the cheese may move, or
2. Update mono, update mono's msbuild, and build the F# compiler there - this is the path Chet and I are on as I think it's the only viable one until the .NET Core runtime and SDK build process stabilize.

[ShalokShalom]

Hi ninjarobot 🤗

Wonderful, that someone cares so much about multi-platform support. I am happy to meet you.

See, AppImage and Flatpak and Docker and Habitat and systemd-nspawn and tons of other solutions are surely known to you. What do you think about using them?

Building once, shipping always the current version also on outdated distros and maintaining the potential packaging issues in one, instead of ten packages seem quite appealing.

I already suggested this a year ago. FSharp is unable to build on my distro since a couple of years!
KaOS uses the current version of OpenSSL, which is still in the queue for this release.

I also can see that a package with Visual Studio Code, the LSP plugin, the fsharp compiler itself and custom settings such as using the fs file ending for every new file. Also Fake, Fable and Paket.

The whole FSharp experience in one package. One download, click click ready.

Such a nice package, with all these superb tools included, makes a superb entrance into the language. 😍 And it is improving the setup time at meetups and at home unspeakable.

Call it the FSharp Studio.

Very happy to meet you 🤗

[ninjarobot]

@ShalokShalom good to meet you as well.

I'm not so familiar with Flatpak, but I've used AppImage a bit, and Docker all the time (I maintain the fsharp official docker image). Yes, I recall the OpenSSL issue that meant .NET Core couldn't build on your platform of choice as well, as I think .NET Core uses a slightly older version that's more broadly available.

With either of the two runtime options, the AppImage has to include quite a lot, and you can get an idea from this Dockerfile of what dependencies would need to be on the AppImage to have a working .NET Core SDK. Jo Shields who handles the official mono packaging had similar things to say about mono, just because you really have to include the whole dependency chain.

I don't speak for Microsoft in any way, but I can somewhat understand they don't want to be in the business of shipping those dependencies and normally count on their supported OS distributions providing those packages and support for them. That's fine, it's a gap that communities can fill.

What does it take to get an AppImage with all of the dependencies for the .NET Core SDK, pretty much everything above this line? Is that something you could help with guidance, contributions, or maintenance? I feel getting the .NET Core SDK on top of all that isn't too bad, and that would give an SDK for building applications in F#.

[ShalokShalom]

Is there a specific prevention setup, to prohibit Docker files appearing on the Readme?