In terms of web programming, F# has come on leaps and bounds over the past year. We're seeing users adopting F# who, despite having little or no web development experience, are empowered by the F# web story to rapidly deliver business benefit to their customers. We see this as key a growth area for F# in the future which all developers should be aware of. This is also a key area of expertise for us at Compositional IT.
Perhaps most importantly, in terms of F# on the web, we have seen increased adoption of SAFE Stack, which has greatly increased the opportunities for both internal development teams and IT solution suppliers to adopt F#. We’re excited about the increased awareness of F# in this space, and particularly the understanding that functional programming can be a powerful tool for full-stack web development, rather than simply as a tool for back-end services or so-called "logic islands".
On the server, ASP .NET Core has continued to evolve and grow in utility, with the latest versions providing excellent performance on top of .NET Core 3. Meanwhile, Giraffe and Saturn are two excellent F# libraries that stand on top of ASP .NET Core while allowing developers to take full advantage of many of the language features that F# excels at without needing to compromise.
Lastly, the Fable project – a key component for F# web development – has been upgraded to generate even more efficient and performant code, while work has also been put into documentation and samples. It is also now easier than ever for new developers to contribute to the project. There have been numerous improvements in the surrounding ecosystem, such as the creation of Fable React, Elmish, Feliz, serialization libraries such as Thoth and tooling like Femto, a package management tool to keep NuGet and NPM packages in sync.
To learn more, and to find out which innovations we recommend you adopt and reject, download Compositional IT’s new whitepaper F# In 2020: The Road Ahead.
