Patterns to mix F# and C# in the same solution

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I studied few functional languages, mostly for academical purposes. Nevertheless, when I have to project a client-server application I always start adopting a Domain Driven Design, strictly OOP.

A complex solution written in a .Net framework could get advantages using more than a language and sometimes more than a paradigm. Mixing C or C++ with LUA or Python is a common practice, sometimes embedding prolog can be very interesting. I never tried to mix OOP and functional paradigm.

F# is a newer functional and object oriented language, I see that's it's technically very easy to mix C# with F# libraries in the same solution. But I wonder if it makes any sense: I use LINQ to satisfy many of my functional requirements.

When and how, do you think it's a good idea to mix these two languages together? I wonder if exists a set of patterns that tries that.

Do you actually use F# in a C# solution?

f# design-patterns .net c#
8 Answers

We have an application which gets all of its functionality by loading MEF parts. Most of the parts are written in C#, but there is one part which does binary data processing which is written in F#. In this case F# was simply better suited for the job.

The F# part conforms to an interface defined in C# and the C# application has no idea it's dealing with an F# part (other than the dependency on fsharp.dll).

Of course this doesn't just apply to F#, if someone wants to write or rewrite a part (addon, module, whatever you want to call it) in a different language it will be picked up by MEF and provided to our application without any disadvantages.

We choose the language that is best suited to solve a specific problem and MEF abstracts all the specifics away from us, so we have nothing to worry about.

TimothyP_281490
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