free-vscode-csharp VS HVM

I only tried F# for few days, but it was a pleasant experience on both macos and linux.

dotnet CLI should take care of build process, it can even generate self-sufficient executable (that bundle parts of .NET in them). The infamous required XML boilerplate has also been cut down to near-zero.

My biggest gripe is that Microsoft's debugger is closed-source and proprietary (though free for users of official VSCode builds). There is open-source netcoredbg by Samsung, so you can use VSCod[e,ium] with https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp , but YMMV.

When looking into C# tools though, my understanding is that the main debugging tool is under a proprietary MS license, although maybe I'm misunderstanding that. My question is, is there a FOSS debugger or tool kit for C# development? I did find this on the marketplace but am not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I know this is a bit of a niche case but was hoping to clarify. I'm not committed to VSCodium and am open to other text editors/IDEs, although would prefer to stick with it if possible.

My understanding is that I can install VSCodium and that they have many of the most popular extensions available. They even seem to have an alternative for the C# debugger. I could also use VSCodium and manually install the Microsoft extensions from the distributed VSX files.

and there is a VSCode extension that uses this instead of the MS debugger

https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp

C# language (powered by OmniSharp): Official C# language support. The extension is subject to this restrictive license because it uses Microsoft's proprietary debugger. The source code is available under a MIT license. See this comment in the C# extension repo for some discussion on this. There is an alternative version of the C# extension in the Open VSX Registry that uses Samsung’s MIT-licensed Debugger.

Yeah, Gitpod is pretty nice for what it is. Although it's worth mentioning that certain proprietary Microsoft extensions are licensed for use only in Microsoft distributions of VSCode, so they won't work in Gitpod. Most extensions do work, but Pylance, C#, C/C++ doesn't, to name a few exceptions. Although for C# there is a FOSS extension you can use instead and for C/C++ there is clangd.

I'm not very familiar with C# and .NET, so I can't help you with any specifics. But I do know that Microsoft actively prevent the usage of their proprietary extensions such as the one for C# in non-Microsoft distributions of VS Code, such as VSCodium. Although if you're using VSCodium, you've probably installed the alternative FOSS version of the C# extension, unless you've sideloaded the official C# extension?

For C# there is https://github.com/muhammadsammy/free-omnisharp-vscode for Python there is https://github.com/Microsoft/pyright (Pylance is the proprietary counterpart) for C++ there is https://github.com/clangd/vscode-clangd

If you want to stay FOSS, you can use this fork of the C# plugin which uses a free debugger: https://github.com/muhammadsammy/free-omnisharp-vscode

The download URL for the debugger seems to have changed, but the latest version of the extension should include a fix for that (see muhammadsammy/free-omnisharp-vscode#20).

Reminds me of HVM[0]

[0]https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

Really interesting to see how new lang concepts and refinements keep popping up this last decade, between Vale, Gleam, Hylo, Austral...

Linear types really opened up lots of ways to improve memory management and compilation improvements.

I have a tangential question that is related to this cool new feature.

Warning: the question I ask comes from a part of my brain that is currently melted due to heavy thinking.

Context: I write a fair amount of Clojure, and in Lisps the code itself is a tree. Just like this F# parallel graph type-checker. In Lisps, one would use Macros to perform compile-time computation to accomplish something like this, I think.

More context: Idris2 allows for first class type-driven development, where the types are passed around and used to formally specify program behavior, even down to the value of a particular definition.

Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2?

Also related, is this similar to how HVM works with their "Interaction nets"?

https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://clojure.org/

I'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again.

Impressive presentation but I find two things missing in particular:

* GRIN [1] - arguably a breakthrough in FP compilation; there are several implementation based on this

* HVM [2] - parallel optimal reduction. The results are very impressive.

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-63237-9_19

[2] https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM

Purity has nothing to do with memoization. Haskell's semantics never "rewrite under a lambda" (unlike, e.g. HVM). Calling (\_ -> e) () twice will (modulo optimizations) always perform the computation in e twice.

The most recent exploration of this, that I'm aware of is HVM (another intermediate language / runtime), although this one is not actually based on the lambda calculus, but on the interaction calculus.

Then, actually unrelated but worth mentioning: HVM. Finally, something new on the functional front that isn't dependent types!

If you are into functional PL, how about https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM? You could experiment if you could schedule that on a GPU?

In the interest of seeking ways of optimizing my code, I stumbled upon http://www.rntz.net/datafun/ as a means to do incremental computations of fixpoints while avoiding redundant work. And also the idea of automatic parallelism achieved by using Interaction Nets as a model of computation https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM.