Mastering F#

Table of Contents

Mastering F#

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Getting Started in F#

Key features of F#

Functional and imperative languages

F# and integrated development environments

Using F# with Visual Studio

F# project structure

F# Script File

Using the F# Interactive window

The Visual Studio interactive window

The FSI interactive window

Basic values

Getting started with functions

Partially applied functions

Recursive functions

Higher-order functions

Summary

2. Functional Core with F#

F# primitive types

The unit type

Operator precedence

Custom operators

Immutability, type declarations, and strong type inference

Pattern matching

Functions with pattern matching

Pattern expressions

Guard expressions

Incomplete matches

Wildcard pattern

Tuples

Value matching

Records

Updating records

Functional update

Mutable fields

Field label declarations

Value matching

Common Language Infrastructure mutable records

Union cases

Options in F#

Structural equality and comparison

Custom equality and comparison

Reference cells and side-effects

Active patterns

Partial active patterns

Summary

3. Data Structures in F#

F# Collections

Sequence

Sequence expressions

Working with Seq functions

Creating sequences

Searching and finding elements

Sequence generators

Sequence computation operations

Arrays

Working with Array functions

Arrays and tuples

Array comprehensions

Array.Parallel module

Lists

Tail recursion

List and tuples

List comprehensions

Sets

Map

Advanced data structures

Binary trees

Balanced red-black trees

Summary

4. Imperative Programming in F#

Control structures

Looping

The for...to expression

The for...in expression

The while...do expression

Conditions

Working with conditions

Object-oriented programming

Defining a class

Constructors

Structs

Declaring fields, properties, methods, and static methods

Fields

Explicit fields

Properties

Static properties

Indexed properties

Methods

Static methods

Abstract and virtual methods

Parameters

Inheritance

Abstract

Defining an interface

Implement interface in F# types

Interface inheritance

Extensions

Generics

Using generic constructs

Wildcard generic constructs

Generic constraints

Generic extensions

Using LINQ in F#

Events

Declaring events

Event processing

Declaring delegates

Observables

Interop with C#

Optional parameters

Algebraic data types

Generic extensions consumable in C#

Exposing F# functionality to C#

Summary

5. Asynchronous Programming

Asynchronous workflows in F#

Using let!

Understanding async workflows

Async module

Async.AsBeginEnd

Async.AwaitEvent

Async.AwaitIAsyncResult

Async.AwaitWaitHandle

Async.AwaitTask

Async.FromBeginEnd

Async.FromContinuations

Async.Start

Async.StartChild

Async.StartAsTask

Async.StartChildAsTask

Async.StartImmediate

Async.SwitchToNewThread

Async.SwitchToThreadPool

Async.SwitchToContext

Async.Parallel

Async.OnCancel

Actor programming with MailboxProcessor

Design patterns with MailboxProcessor

Type-safe MailboxProcessor, an imperative approach

Type-safe MailboxProcessor, a functional approach

Messages and union types

Reporting results from the mailbox

Agents and errors

MailboxProcessor functions

Implementing a non-blocking queue

Reactive programming with async workflows

Summary

6. Type Providers

SQL type provider

Preparing the test database

Using the type provider

Querying the data

SQL entity type provider

Using the type provider

Querying the data

OData type provider

Prerequisites

Using the type provider

Querying the data

Web service type provider

Prerequisites

Using the type provider

Querying the data

Data analysis with type providers

Prerequisites

Using the type provider

Query builder

Summary

7. Web Programming in F#

ASP.NET Web API 2

Suave

Routing with Suave

Templating with Suave

WebSharper

Installing WebSharper

Sitelets

UI.Next

Fable

Using Fable with React

Summary

8. Application Development in F#

GitHub Electron

npm

webpack

Using React components with Electron

npm start

Automatic refresh on code changes

Using Node APIs from the renderer process

Summary

9. Testing in F#

Unit testing

Unit tests with NUnit

Setting up the test environment

Mocking

F# idiomatic assertions

Asynchronous tests

Running NUnit tests with FAKE

NUnit and Fable

Property-based testing

Integrating FsCheck and NUnit

Automated browser testing

Summary

10. Distributed Programming in F#

Actor Model

MailboxProcessor

Akka.NET

Supervision

Remote actors

Summary

Mastering F#

Mastering F#

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

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First published: November 2016

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Credits

About the Authors

Alfonso García-Caro Núñez is a linguist who, in recent years, changed the study of natural languages by the practice of their programming counterparts. He currently focuses on JavaScript and .NET development and has worked on developing mobile, web, and desktop applications for several industries, such as video games, education, green energy, or digital performances. He is also an international speaker who has presented at several conferences around the globe. His admiration for both the thriving JavaScript ecosystem and functional programming with F# made him look for a way to bring together both worlds, leading to the creation of Fable, an F# to JavaScript compiler that is attracting lot of attention from the community, and integrates the power and elegance of F# with the hundreds of JavaScript tools and libraries available.

I would like to say a big thank you to all the members of the incredibly supportive and welcoming F# community. Since my first timid steps into functional programming, I have been always encouraged to give my opinion and contribute to the development of the ecosystem and the language itself. Features and tools are important, but it is openness and collaboration that really makes you proud to belong to a community. Neither this book nor anything else in my life would have been possible without the care and love of my family. I dedicate this as well as all my work to the women of my life: my mother, wife, and daughter.

Suhaib Fahad is an entrepreneur and is running a startup; he is also an expert F# programmer and enthusiast, using F# in various domains within the products that he is building. He is extremely passionate about developing in functional languages and loves to engage with developers of different communities. He has also been researching and working with cloud scale applications since 2012. Fahad lives in Bangalore, the IT hub of India, with his wife and baby boy.

About the Reviewer

Dr Basel Abu-Jamous is a post-doctorate researcher in the area of bioinformatics at the University of Oxford. He is interested in the development of new computational algorithms that address bioinformatic questions with a special focus on tunable consensus clustering methods. He is also interested in the application of such methods in biology and medicine. For instance, he currently works in Dr. Steven Kelly’s laboratory within the C4 Rice Project that aims to improve photosynthetic efficiency in rice and thus to enhance crop yields. As such, the C4 Rice Project is one of the scientific Grand Challenges of the 21st century, involving the coordinated efforts of researchers from 12 institutions in eight countries.

Previously, while being in the group of Professor Asoke Nandi at Brunel University London, he worked closely with Professor David Roberts, the Professor of Hematology at John Radcliffe Hospital and the University of Oxford, to understand the genetic programs responsible for erythropoiesis, that is, the production of red blood cells in human bodies. He was also in collaboration with Professor Adrian Harris and Professor Francesca Buffa, experts in breast cancer at Churchill Hospital and the University of Oxford, to analyze genetic regulatory pathways in breast cancer tumors under hypoxia, that is, low levels of oxygen. Additionally, he was also involved in the analysis of data from other areas including baker’s yeast, malaria, and E. coli bacteria.

Dr Abu-Jamous received his Ph.D. from Brunel University London in July 2015 and was awarded the Dean’s Prize for Innovation and Impact in Doctoral Research in the area of electronic and computer engineering in December of the same year. In January 2015, he was appointed by Professor Nandi as a research assistant at Brunel University London, and in July 2016 he moved to the University of Oxford.

He has published eight journal papers, fourteen peer-reviewed full-length papers in international conferences, and a research monograph book (Abu-Jamous, Fa, and Nandi, Integrative cluster analysis in bioinformatics, John Wiley & Sons, 2015).

Dr Abu-Jamous would like to thank the C4 Rice Project for funding his current research, Brunel University London and the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) for funding his Ph.D. degree and his previous post-doctorate research (NIHR grant reference number RP-PG-0310-1004). He would also like to thank his current and previous supervisors, Dr Steven Kelly and Professor Nandi, respectively, and all colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family for their support.

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Preface

F# is a multiparadigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and supported both by industry-leading companies who provide professional tools and by an active open community, F# is rapidly gaining popularity as it emerges in digital music advertising and creating music focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with F#, explains how to get started with F# with Visual Studio. A Simple hello world program is created and details about the project structure and file ordering and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage are discussed.

Chapter 2, Functional Core with F#, teaches you about the functional core of F#, such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, lazy evaluation, making side effects explicit, and so on.

Chapter 3, Data Structures in F#, helps you understand how to use the available data structures in F# and write some basic custom data structures.

Chapter 4, Imperative Programming in F#, teaches you how to use control structures, more idiomatic .NET with F#, and interfacing with C# and generics.

Chapter 5, Asynchronous Programming, goes through the asynchronous programming model in F#, with a bit of cross-referencing or comparison drawn with the C# world.

Chapter 6, Type Providers, talks about some of the most common type providers, and additionally, also looks at the Query build that will help write LINQ-like queries for our custom collections.

Chapter 7, Web Programming in F#, teaches you how to build web servers using some of the most common .NET libraries as well as how you can write code for the browser in F# using WebSharper or Fable.

Chapter 8, Application Development in F#, explains how to write cross-platform desktop applications in F# using Fable and the Github Electron project.

Chapter 9, Testing in F#, teaches you how to write unit tests in F# with popular tools, and the advantages the language offers for this.

Chapter 10, Distributed Programming in F#, delves into using F# to implement the actor model popularized by Erlang, in order to write more robust software using decoupled actors that can run on different machines over a network and heal themselves in the eventuality of failure.

What you need for this book

All you need for this book is a computer that can comfortably run the following software applications: An F# IDE like Visual Studio 2015 (with Visual F# Power Tools), Visual Studio for Mac or Visual Studio Code with the Ionide extension.

Who this book is for

If you are a C# developer with a basic knowledge of F# and want to explore the functional programming paradigm further to master your F# skills, then this book is for you.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The class overrides a ToString function from the base class.

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let x = 20

    if not (x < 10) then

        printfn x is greater than 10

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

> let p = new Point(10, 20);;

val p : Point = Point 10, 20

New terms and important words are shown in bold. 

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

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Chapter 1. Getting Started in F#

F# is a functional first language in the .NET family and is a derivative of the Meta-Language (ML) family of languages. It shares many features with dialects of ML, which originally derives from the classical ML language designed by Robin Milner in 1973 at the University of Edinburgh. As a .NET language, F# code compiles to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), which runs on top of Common Language Runtime (CLR).

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

The key features of F#

The functional and imperative languages

Using F# with Visual Studio

Basic expressions in F#

Key features of F#

The following are some points that Distinguish the F# language from other .NET languages:

F# is a functional first language, which means that functions are treated as first-class citizens, but it also provides ways to work with other paradigms, such as object-oriented programming (OOP) (as in C#).

Unlike other languages, such as C#, which mixes expressions (language constructs returning a value) and statements (constructs that don't return a value), F# is an expression-based language. You can think of every syntax construct in F# as a small function.

F# is a strongly-typed language, meaning that the type of every expression in the program is determined at compile time. This allows the compiler to make verifications in our code and enables great tooling support, such as autocompletion, refactoring, and so on.

Additionally, F# has a very strong type inference mechanism to infer types for the expressions in a program. This removes much of the verbosity usually associated with strongly-typed languages.

The .NET generics' type system is baked into the core of F#. For example, the programmer doesn't have to specify the functions to be generic; if the F# type system infers the variables can be generic (provided it is implemented that way), the function becomes generic. This makes it easier to write polymorphic code, that is, functions that can be reused with different types.

F# has a module system that allows data structures to be specified and defined abstractly. Unlike C# namespaces, F# modules can contain functions that help you separate data (types) from logic (functions in modules).

F# implements a pattern matching mechanism, which allows controlling conditions based upon structural similarities; whereas, other languages only allow value matching as in IF...ELSE statements in C#.

Functional and imperative languages

Imperative languages usually modify the state of a variable for most operations. This makes it more difficult to reason about our program, particularly when different parts of our code change values that are globally accessible. When a piece of code modifies a value outside its scope, we talk about side-effects (this may also include other state modifications, such as file or console operations). OOP tries to tame side-effects by encapsulating state. However, this is not always a complete solution, as objects often develop tight and complex dependencies with each other that are still difficult to reason with.

Functional languages solve this problem using pure functions. Pure functions are closer to the mathematical ideal of functions, in the sense that they don't have side-effects (don't change state outside their scope) and always produce the same output given the same input. Pure functions are easier to refactor and reason with because their output is predictable, and can be used as building blocks to write large programs with different techniques of function composition.

F#, as described, is a functional-first language, but the language can also deal with unavoidable side-effects such as file or logging operations.

To compare F# with a more imperative language, we can take the example of a Fibonacci sequence generator, as follows:

Note

For illustration purposes, C# in procedural style is used. It is also capable of more functional implementations, such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Also, performance is not taken into consideration.

In an imperative language, the algorithm is normally implemented as a loop, and progress is made by modifying the state of the variables used