Giraffe VS language-ext

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

You probably noticed that .SetName() returns a Either. You may have come across Unit in libraries like MediatR or Language-Ext. It's a simple construct representing a type with only one possible value. We use it as a placeholder for operations that do not return a value but may return another state. In our example, .SetName() is a Command that does not return a value but may fail. Therefore, the monad Either carries two possible states: Right (without value) or Left (with an Error).

Language-Ext is my personal favourite, but it can be a bit overwhelming for beginners due to its extensive feature set

> but I just want something closer to Scala, but for .Net

That's what I'm working toward with my language-ext library [1]. Obviously more support for expression based programming would be welcome (and higher kinds), but you can do a lot with LINQ and a good integrated library surface.

[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext

Definitely a fan of option types, I wonder this library has anything over the C# library language-ext which also has an Option type?

Hey, I am considering adopting the Result pattern in my codebase. Wanted to get some opinions from someone who has experience with it: should I start with language-ext or FunctionalExtensions?

> [1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext

Cool library. I've had a few of these patterns in my Sasa library for years, but you've taken it to the Haskell extreme! Probably further than most C# developers could stomach. ;-)

You might be interested in checking out the hash array mapped trie from Sasa [1]. It cleverly exploits the CLR's reified generics to unbox the trie at various levels which ends up saving quite a bit of space and indirections, so it performs almost on par with the mutable dictionary.

I had an earlier version that used an outer struct to ensure it's never null, similar to how your collections seem to work, but switched to classes to make it more idiomatic in C#.

I recently started sketching out a Haskell-like generic "Deriving" source generator, contrasted with your domain-specific piecemeal approach, ie. [Record], [Reader], etc. Did you ever try that approach?

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sasa/code/ci/default/tree/Sasa.Col...

[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/sasa/code/ci/57417faec5ed442224a0f...

languageext supports linq for its monads and I kinda love it. The challenge is convincing my colleagues. 😅

language-ext supports it and it's pretty dang cool.

I can only recommend c# language extensions library https://github.com/louthy/language-ext