Giraffe VS csharplang

Giraffe is another interesting one to explore: https://giraffe.wiki/

Giraffe is nice because it is itself built "just" as ASP.NET Core Middleware so it plays a bit more nicely than Suave with a mixed stack of C#-defined Middleware.

It's more likely you accidentally fall back into just translating C# patterns to non-idiomatic F# with Giraffe, but it's also nicer when in that case of needing to live in both worlds and use a mixture of libraries built for C# ASP.NET projects.

There are also some F# frameworks built on top of ASP.NET core like https://giraffe.wiki

If you have an interest in F#, I highly recommend diving in because (1) it has a ton of things you might learn to appreciate in C#; (2) it has things C# cannot have. I do like some of the suggestions people have made regarding mixing your code bases, but I'll also say that building, say, endpoint routing in Giraffe is (to repeat myself) easy, simple, and elegant.

Bix is a micro-framework designed with F# in mind and that runs on both Deno and Bun! and in theory it also should even run in a service worker! (intercepting fetch requests) although I haven't tested that yet, it offers a general purpose handler that coupled with a set of route definitions it can bring a Giraffe/Saturn like framework to life in JavaScript runtimes which is incredibly awesome! useful? maybe not 😅, but awesome indeed. Let's see some code for it

Backend: Most likely it would be a toss between https://saturnframework.org or https://giraffe.wiki. They both combins the extremely good type system in F# combined with the ease of a minimal API.

I was wondering if its possible to simultaneously run a C# core MVC project in combination with https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe

By default Giraffe, the framework which I use as a web server, uses Newtonsoft.Json to serialize results to JSON. However, for discriminated union, it generates quite a lot of JSON so I've switched to System.Text.Json which is built into newer versions of .Net Core. In combination with FSharp.SystemTextJson package allows serializing discriminated unions more gracefully. All we need is to decorate Branch type with JsonFSharpConverter(JsonUnionEncoding.BareFieldlessTags) attribute.

Giraffe is a library that sits atop ASP.NET Core and allows developers to build web applications in a functional style; dotnet new giraffe is literally my starting point when I begin a new web application project. (Rather than write three more sentences filled with effusive praise, I’ll just leave it at that; it’s great.) It also provides a view engine (that builds upon Suave‘s “experimental” view engine) which uses an F# DSL to define HTML in a strongly-typed way. It has been incredibly efficient for a while, but with .NET’s work over the past two releases at improving performance, and Giraffe’s adoption of those techniques, it is lightning fast.

Wrapping ASP.NET Core to be easier and more idiomatic with F# seems to be a common domain. Out of curiosity, did you look at any existing projects? If so, what was lacking from them that made you decide to write WebFrame?

Giraffe: https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe

Certain parts of Microsoft Learn are permissive, for example the .NET BCL documentation is Creative Commons Attribution: https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet-api-docs as is ASP.NET Core: https://github.com/dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs (a good hint if documentation is permissively licensed and on GitHub is if there's an edit button at the top.)

The C# language specification is unfortunately a bit fuzzier: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/4855

The updated unified C# language specification is CC, but it's still catching up to modern C#: https://github.com/dotnet/csharpstandard

No OP, but for example you still see the C# folks still struggling to add discriminated unions to the language because of complex interactions due to its too many features[1]. Virtual threads are easier to use than async/await is another example.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/113

For example, C# had a research fork called Spec# that had compile-time support for contracts, with keywords such as requires (for arguments) and ensures (for return values), all the way back in 2004. While still being discussed, it doesn't seem to be shipping any time soon.

Hi there. I'm the language designer who created the 'Collection Expression' design/specification: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/5354

You can see the entire history of the proposal there. To answer you specific question, we went with `..` because that's what the language already uses for the complimentary 'pattern matching deconstruction' form for collection patterns.

In other words, you can already say this today:

    if (x is [var start, .. var middle, .. var end]) { ... }

You must specify concrete type.

There was a plan to have "natural type" so "var list = [1,2,3]" would be of type "List" but it was postponed to C# 13 (https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/5354#issuecommen...)

While C# currently lacks direct support for this kind of functionality, there's a glimmer of hope with an active proposal under discussion that aims to bring this feature to the language. This potential addition promises a future where C# can natively offer similar robust type narrowing.

Given few people anticipated ValueTuple and C# adding a more direct tuple syntax, I feel like it is only a matter of time before C# adds discriminated unions.

(There are multiple proposals tracking the idea. This seems the most comprehensive and "central": https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/7016)

I always liked list abbreviations in python, but I absolutely love Linq. I believe there is a feature proposal for C# 12, which makes collection initialization better imo.