F# Type Providers

lightning talk presented at Milwaukee Functional Programming group in March 2018

Transcript

1. F# Type Providers
   

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2. What is a type provider?
   "An F# type provider is a component that
   provides types, properties, and methods for
   use in your program. Type providers are a
   significant part of F# 3.0 support for
   information-rich programming.”
   
   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/type-providers/index
   

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3. So . . . code generation?
   • Real-time
   
   • Only lives inside compiler (erased types)
   
   • Leverages power of F# type system
   

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4. Why use them?
   • Deal with external data in a type-safe way
   
   • Very low friction for quickly interacting with data
   
   • Not an SDK that has to be versioned, updated, etc
   

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5. DEMO
   

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6. Windows only?
   • Almost ready for primetime with .NET Core 2.1
   
   • FSharp.Data ported, many others being updated
   

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7. Next steps
   • Original paper “Types from data: Making structured data
   first-class citizens in F#”

   http://tomasp.net/academic/papers/fsharp-data/fsharp-data.pdf
   
   • Check out some type providers

   https://github.com/fsprojects/awesome-fsharp#type-providers
   
   • Build your own type provider

   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/tutorials/type-
   providers/creating-a-type-provider
   
   • Learn F#

   https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp
   

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