F# fsharp
Brandon Van Every <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.games.devel.sweng |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Microsoft recently shipped F# as a fully supported product in Visual Studio 2010. Functional programming could finally become a mainstream player in the computer industry, given its interoperability with the CLI and .NET. Recently on this list, some people said they were using C# as a "scripting" language, mainly because they had engineers who were already familiar with it. Hand waving about people being unable / unwilling to hit the ground running with Lua in 1..2 weeks... yes I am biased and dismissive of that rationale, as Lua is the dominant scripting language of the game industry by a large margin. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkDeLoura/20090302/581/The_Engine_Survey_General_results.php Leaving that aside, it emerged during the debate that compiled C# is significantly faster than Lua. The C# "scripters" feel that if they compile the C# code, then they don't have to worry about the language being the source of performance problems. Personally I think it's a bad tradeoff in terms of expressiveness and having an interpreter available. I also can't say that I like what the C++ / Java / C# universe represents as far as how to structure software. Anyways, F# doesn't suffer from such structural liabilities; you can program or metaprogram anything you want. If F# compiles to within a ballpark of C# performance, one would seem to have one's scripting cake and eat it too. Is anyone currently considering this, or acting upon this? I searched the archives for both "F#" and "fsharp" but I didn't get any hits. Cheers, Brandon Van Every _______________________________________________ Sweng-Gamedev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com