Preface
It’s well-known today that F# has been quite a first class citizen, a built-in part of programming language support in Visual Studio from Visual Studio 2010. F# is a programming language that has its own unique trait: it is a functional programming language, and at the same time, it has OOP support. F# has run on .NET until now, although we can also run F# as a cross-platform language, such as on Android (using Mono).
Although F# mostly runs faster than C# or VB when doing computations, F# has its own unique performance characteristics. Some of the performance characteristics might not be so obviously identified and code implementations might have implicit bad practices and subtleties that may lead to performance bottlenecks. The bottlenecks may or may not be faster than C#/VB counterparts, although some of the bottlenecks may share the same performance characteristics, such as the use of .NET APIs.
The main goal of this book is to identify the performance problems in F#, measuring and optimizing F# code to run more efficiently, while also maintaining the functional programming style as appropriately as possible.
This book focuses on optimizing F#. A basic skill of F# knowledge (including functional programming concept and basic OOP) is a prerequisite to start understanding its performance problems and optimizing F#.
