dark VS Giraffe

Yes. Darklang was originally in OCaml using js_of_ocaml, and we ported it to F# using Blazor (https://github.com/darklang/dark/tree/main/backend/src/Wasm). It works.

We found that in dotnet 6, the code was much slower, with long startup times and a much bigger download, than in js_of_ocaml. It also had a lot of issues in running in a Webworker, which wasn't the case for js_of_ocaml.

In dotnet 7, the webworker issues are better and AOT is easier, so startup is faster. Download sizes are still bad, and it's still slower than js_of_ocaml.

However, dotnet allows almost any code to run in WASM, which js_of_ocaml had large limitations. This meant a decent chunk of functionality had to be worked around to make separate js vs native targets, which also was a massive pain and took a long time. Dune's virtual targets wasn't ready at the time - I think we were one of the test cases for it.

Why should I use this instead of https://darklang.com/

First it was probably Dark. They made a lot of noise some years ago, but then I never heard of them again (looking at their current website, looks like they moved on to AI now, obviously).

Reminds me of Darklang. Personally, I don't think vendoring cloud services into a language is going to be beneficial. I'm curious how the language deals with vendor updates. Do I have to upgrade the language then? If so, I see a lot conflicts coming from this. Then it comes down to Javascript or HCL, the HCL bit makes me think that the below statement is not as truthy as it is on the surface:

We still don't have all that many users (~100 active), so I'm not sure you'll find an answer here. But we collect that sort of feedback publicly, which might answer your question: https://github.com/darklang/dark/discussions/categories/feed...

I wish I could remember what took me to YCombinator's website on the 10th of October, 2022. That was when I first heard about Wasp and another language called DarkLang. After I learned about Wasp, I was intrigued and curious to know how it works, which led me to join the discord server the next day.

Some languages that try to integrate an HTTP server and a database:

Ur/Web: http://impredicative.com/ur/

Dark (Darklang): https://darklang.com/

There are others in this space I did not assess like Encore, Shuttle, Modal, and Dark. These were not assessed for the sake of time. If you're interested in IfC, I encourage you to take a look at these others.

Oh, finally! I was waiting to build my serverless CRUD webapp in Dark (OCaml + JavaScript and Fsharp?) until they had support for returning negative numbers on a GET request!

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