F# at Microsoft Research

Established: October 22, 2012

F# is a succinct, expressive, and efficient functional and object-oriented language for Microsoft .NET that helps you write simple code to solve complex problems.

These pages are the historical home of F# at Microsoft Research. For the latest information on F# today, see the links to the right.

F# brings you type safe, succinct, efficient, and expressive functional programming language. This simple and pragmatic language has particular strengths in data-oriented programming, parallel I/O programming, parallel CPU programming, scripting, and algorithmic development. It enables you to access a huge library and tools base and comes with a strong set of development tools. F# combines the advantages of typed functional programming with high-quality, well-supported modern runtime systems. F# 3.0 incorporates ground-breaking features in integrating Internet-scale information sources and services into strongly typed programming languages. The active F# community contributes tools for Emacs, Vim, Linux, Mac, iOS, Windows, Android, JavaScript, and HTML5.

Microsoft Research contributes to F# through the language design and Try F#.

F# is open source under an OSI-approved license (Apache 2.0) and is available across multiple platforms through the F# Software Foundation. You can contribute to F# in many ways, including through that organization.

Microsoft make free Visual F# Tools for Visual Studio and these tools are also included in Visual Studio Professional and Ultimate. This makes F# one of the few languages with both a strong open source community and a supported, professional product from Microsoft.

F# originated at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. The Microsoft Research team continues to partner with teams across Microsoft and with external open-source organizations, researchers, companies and users to break new ground in programming language systems, including F#. Microsoft Research staff continue to contribute to F#, its ecosystem and research based around F#.

For more information on using F# today, see the links below.