So, I've been making a slightly more concerted effort to pick up F# because I've always liked F# and .Net core and Fable means that I might actually get to run it at work without the non-starter of switching stuff over to windows servers. Excellent.
The main holdup is that the build/packaging situation is disastrous.
Most stuff still relies on Mono, which is fine, but trying to get things running on core quickly runs you into articles that assume you know exactly what you're doing and how all the pieces fit together, which is also fine.
What's not fine is that the base task of wanting to download existing packages and run the result doesn't have a simple solution. The base .net core install comes with a project.json solution, which seems completely sane to me, but apparently that's deprecated and not how to do things. Then there's Nuget which is a package repo but apparently not a package manager because it's supposed to be a VS extension but maybe it is in the next version because there's a shell. There's also msbuild and some variant of it for fsharp which is mostly opaque XML but can be managed using a project called forge, which seemed to kind of work for me but also seems very opaque. There's also paket which manages dependencies from nuget, there's also Fake which seems to be a Rake-like build system.
I know I'm not the only one who's run into this. I've seen at least 4 other requests for help in various F# forums and everybody seems to pretty much shrug and say that they use VS.
If one of the F# cognoscenti could write up simple instructions on how to set up a project and run it using VSCode and .Net core, I'd be grateful.
The main holdup is that the build/packaging situation is disastrous.
Most stuff still relies on Mono, which is fine, but trying to get things running on core quickly runs you into articles that assume you know exactly what you're doing and how all the pieces fit together, which is also fine.
What's not fine is that the base task of wanting to download existing packages and run the result doesn't have a simple solution. The base .net core install comes with a project.json solution, which seems completely sane to me, but apparently that's deprecated and not how to do things. Then there's Nuget which is a package repo but apparently not a package manager because it's supposed to be a VS extension but maybe it is in the next version because there's a shell. There's also msbuild and some variant of it for fsharp which is mostly opaque XML but can be managed using a project called forge, which seemed to kind of work for me but also seems very opaque. There's also paket which manages dependencies from nuget, there's also Fake which seems to be a Rake-like build system.
I know I'm not the only one who's run into this. I've seen at least 4 other requests for help in various F# forums and everybody seems to pretty much shrug and say that they use VS.
If one of the F# cognoscenti could write up simple instructions on how to set up a project and run it using VSCode and .Net core, I'd be grateful.