The Microsoft Visual F# team are pleased to announce the availability of our code drop of an F# 3.1 compiler, library and tests.
This code drop corresponds to the release of the Visual F# Tools for F# 3.1 as part of Visual Studio 2013. We have also recently released some great new samples showing the unique power of F#.
F# is an open, cross-platform language and you can read testimonials about how F# is used in the software industry at the pages of the F# Software Foundation, a major community organization for the F# language.
The Visual F# Tools team at Microsoft contribute to F# through enterprise-ready tooling in Visual Studio 2013. We recommend the Visual F# Tools as the best, most productive and highly stable route for functional-first programming in the Windows ecosystem. You can find out more about functional-first programming in industry in the recent talk Succeeding With Functional First Programming in Industry at NDC Oslo, and at the excellent website F# for Fun and Profit (external link). You can also learn F# in your browser using Try F#.
The F# community contribute a range of open tools for use with F#. These can be UI tools such as code visualizers, editing tools, or new ways of executing, hosting or interpreting F# code, or indeed whole new F# editing experiences. For example,
- the FCell tools for integrating F# with Microsoft Excel
- the Fantomas code formatter
- the Emacs mode for F#
- the Tsunami IDE tools for F#
- the F# bindings for OSX, Android and iOS programming with Xamarin Studio
These and others make F# programming available for a broad range of situations, including many not covered by the Visual F# Tools from Microsoft.
If you want to use F# 3.1 today on Windows, you should use one of the installations of Visual Studio 2013 available at the F# MSDN Developer Center. For free Visual F# tools for Windows you should currently continue to use F# 3.0 in the Visual Studio 2012 F# web tools (we are actively pursuing an F# 3.1 update for this).
If you would like to join the F# Community and help improve F# tooling and across multiple platforms, you can join the discussion group. The F# community do most development on GitHub - they take the code drops of the Visual F# Tools team from CodePlex and incorporate them into the GitHub repository.
This source code drop is under the Apache 2.0 license and a reference copy is published on CodePlex. It has already been integrated into the fsharp_31 branch of the primary repository of the F# community on GitHub.
As this release is a code drop, it does not contain binaries for the release.
Enjoy!
The Visual F# Tools team