[MonoDevelop] GSoC 2010, F# language binding

[Piotr Zurek]

Hi Viktor,

I'm not a member of the MonoDevelop team, but I've asked some of those
questions, so I hope I can share what I found out.

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 06:10, lost <lostfreeman at gmail.com> wrote:
> This year I've decided to take part in Google Summer of Code. I've
> checked Mono's StudentProjects page and found a note about F# binding.
> There was a suggestion to write to mailing list, mhutch or lluis specifically.

First of all you should know that Vasili Glachin has spent a lot of
time and effort working on an F# binding recently.
You can find his code here: http://github.com/vasili/FSharpBinding/
I'm pretty sure Vasili won't mind somebody helping out, but since a
GSoC project should be a well defined and measurable unit of work,
maybe you could work on a specific feature like code completion or the
refactoring engine? Or both of them depending on how much work is
involved. Micheal is probably the best person to talk about that.
One project that would be extremely cool, in opinion of course, is
getting Stetic to produce F# code for the UI. That would be first ever
since even VS will not have a graphical designer for F#.

> Before writting an application I should be aware of the following:
>
> Do you need your own compiler or using existing fsc from Microsoft is ok?
> Can I use CodeDom library, provided with Microsoft F#?
> These two questions are about licensing. I've also asked in F# forum (
> http://cs.hubfs.net/forums/thread/13591.aspx ), but still have no
> answer.

I'm pretty sure using fsc should be OK, especially if Microsoft keep
their promise of releasing it under Ms-PL. We should know that soon
after they release VS2010.

> Can I write binding in F# itself, specifically, is it ok to have
> reference to FSharp.Core and FSharp.PowerPack libraries from Microsoft
> build?

The less external dependencies the better. I would recommend getting
as far as possible without using any external code.
Of course if you decide to work on the source code completion or
refactoring engine, using CodeDom probably be acceptable, especially
if it is created as an optional feature of the binding.

I'm really glad to see more and more interest in F# support in MonoDevelop.

Cheers,
Piotr