ionide-vscode-fsharp VS smartstring

I'd love to see something similar to Microsoft's Ionide project or for JetBrains to invest in IDE support.

> Pretty good, https://ionide.io

It pains me to admit it because I really like F# but, with due respect to the developers, Ionide and its related projects are the most unstable toolchain I've ever used.

Spend half a day reloading the editor because the extension keeps hanging on non-trivial MSBuild only to discover that the formatter has truncated in half one of the files you worked on due to a soundness bug. (OCaml's editor support, in contrast, is quite stable.)

Rider is the best editing experience I've had with F#, by far.

I know it's a recurring topic but it's reaching a high level of pain *again* (see NET SDK 6.0.400 and 7.0.100 previews don't currently work with Ionide).

I don't disagree but it owes a lot of that to OCaml. That said, since we're talking about C#, F# and VS Code I'm gonna talk about a pet peeve I have. If you open a C# project in VS Code when the "Ionide" (basically the F# plugin for Code) is installed then Ionide thinks it's a F# project and will open some F# stuff after a few seconds (or prompt you to setup some F# stuff in its gitignore). The root cause has been identified (plugin activates when it sees a ".sln" file), a PR have been opened and rejected with no mention as to why (https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp/pull/1401) and the developers behind it are frustratingly non-communicative about it, closing issues about it (https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp/issues/1701). Usual rules about OSS maintainers apply, they don't technically owe us users anything ... but man it feels like we're being trolled by now :D

F# doesn't have a hard dependency on vscode. Resources from MS will obviously encourage using MS tooling, but ionide [1] is really good. The lsp+neovim workflow is not as good but getting better.

[1] https://ionide.io/

Important thread about this: https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp/issues/1693

Perf Avore was developed on VSCode using the ionide plugin and dotnet cli.

I was on .Net 5 but same issue on 6. I tried the fix here- setting FSharp.dotnetRoot explicitly in settings.json and so far it seems better.

Make sure to keep an eye on this MR for that very capability :)

Your use case sounds like it will involve a lot of small strings that use a subset of UTF-8. If you’re concerned about performance, you could look into something like smartstring. Sixbit also looks interesting, but it looks like it won’t give you any more characters and it’d probably require additional computation to do the conversion (and they’d have to be converted back out).

> If you have a long-running async function, then pass parameters by value! If you have a polymorphic async function, then return your result in a Box.

I've taken to making heavy use of the smallvec and smartstring crates for this. Most lists and strings are small in practice. Using smallvec / smartstring lets you keep most clone() calls allocation-free. This in turn lets you use owned objects, which are easier to reason about - for you and the borrow checker. And you keep a lot of the performance of just passing around references.

I tried to use async rust a couple of years ago, and fell on my face in the process. Most of my rust at the moment is designed to compile to wasm - and then I'm leaning on nodejs for networking and IO. Writing async networked code is oh so much easier to reason about in javascript. When GAT, TAIT and some other language features to fix async land I'll muster up the courage to make another attempt. But rust's progress at fixing these problems feels painfully slow.

https://crates.io/crates/smallvec / https://crates.io/crates/smartstring

Just to point out, smartstring no longer assumes String memory layout. From the changelog:

There's some really good crates that implement SSO floating around - eg, SmartString. But I agree - its a pity they're needed. Swift built this into the core string type in the language. I think that was the right call.

Comparatively: * SmolStr can inline up to 22 bytes but does not adjust down for 32-bit architectures, meaning it's potentially wasting memory on 32-bit archs. Similarly though it's immutable and Clone is O(1) * SmartString can inline up to 23 bytes, but it's mutable and Clone is O(n). Also this crate makes assumptions about the memory layout of a String, which in theory should be fine, but is a slight caveat.

SmartString is used to store identifiers (which tends to be short, fewer than 23 characters, and ASCII-based) because they can usually be stored inline. Map keys now also use SmartString.

I’ve been using smartstrings, which is both excellent and maintained. https://github.com/bodil/smartstring