F# News

Following the ground-breaking product release of Visual F# by Microsoft as part of Visual Studio 2010, we have updated our F# for Technical Computing book to cover both F# 2.0 and .NET 4.

Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing includes a variety of changes throughout the book, some affecting changes to the language and others affecting the use of libraries. The three most prominent changes are:

• Chapter 10: Concurrent Programming now covers the final production-quality implementation of asynchronous workflows in the F# 2.0 language.

• Chapter 11: Parallel Programming now replaces the TPL CTP with the constructs for shared-memory parallelism that have been integrated into .NET 4. Both the API and the performance characteristics have changed considerably.

• Chapter 12: Performance has been completely revamped due to massive improvements in the F# compiler and the new garbage collector in .NET 4.

One particular surprise was the substantial difference in performance characteristics between Visual Studio 2010 and the F# prereleases. Several of the benchmarks covered in the book show 400% changes!

Labels: f# for technical computing, second edition, visual f# 2010 for technical computing

# posted by Jon Harrop @ 00:12