F#: What to Expect from It in the Near Future?

In recent posts, Brian McNamara and Don Syme, of the F# research team, have shed some light on their plans for the near future. According to Don Syme's blog post on productization the F#, the team is planning an April update to the Microsoft Research Release of F#. The release will:

• Contain over 100 bug fixes and feature completions to the core F# language.
• Address some language design issues that we'd been putting off for some time
• Be matched by a draft of the F# Language Specification

Brian McNamara has revealed the intention to create a CTP release some time during this summer. The main features to be included in the release will be:

• fsc.exe, the compiler that knows the F# language
• fsi.exe, the interactive command environment
• the F# libraries (usual stuff, ranging from immutable lists to asynchronous computations library)
• an msbuild task which lets you build an F# ".fsproj" project from the command line

There is work in progress on integrating F# with the Visual Studio development environment, and will be working either with the free of charge Visual Studio Shell, or the Visual Studio 2008. For that purpose, F# will contain the following components:

• F# language service, which provides syntax highlighting, intellisense, tooltips, etc.
• F# project system, which enables you to add/remove .fs files, reference dlls, etc.
• F# interactive window, where fsi is hosted inside Visual Studio

The current RC is F# 1.9.3 with its latest update 1.9.3.14 released on January 18, 2008.