Not the person you replied to but I leave unused variables as future TODOs. It's a warning in F#. I also often use them for inspecting data in the debugger

Waiting for async to finish and await are two different things. Async functions essentially have a different calling convention than standard functions. They're either converting your code into continuation passing style, state machines (C#, Rust), or using some sort of stack save+restore usually.

I agree we shouldn't need to `await` everything though. Effects with inference and implicit perform/await is possible

I keep asking LLMs if I can define an interface implementation as an expression or without creating a new type in C#

Every single one I ask always happily says yes, and starts claiming C# has local classes (a feature of Java)

A VM with good FFI and structs is pretty unique and all of the tooling around .NET is excellent

F# is a sleeping giant of capability in the FP/ML space, being able to use a lot of the existing tooling

People rightfully point out how it's sort of second class in comparison to C# at times, but its still A tier tooling that few languages have

Any lesser known knobs one should know? I'm considering a .NET backend for my compiler

If on Windows, one is to see what C++/CLI would generate, with ildisam or similar tool.

You can also emit MSIL for what you actually want to do, with low-level bytecodes.

Then there is unsafe, ref structs, stack allocation, fixed buffers, scoped types, manual memory management, array pools, memory pipelines, the various span variants.

I've been working on a C++ backend for F# and while I'm very familiar with F# and it's AST I barely know C++. The amount of time I save being able to ask things, check my understanding, get design patterns, and paste issues I'm having for a fix is insane

I ran into an issue where I was getting a segfault and everything looked right in the debuggr, including expected values near the segfault. Turns out I wasn't using placement new somewhere I needed, and the data for the object was getting copied but not the vtables. I have no idea how long it would have taken me to figure that out on my own because the segfault was coming from so far away

I haven't had the opportunity to use LLMs much for coding since I'm not working right now, but I can second how much of a boost just getting specific answers to my questions instead of reading tons of whatever online searches return is.

Rubber duck that talks back is a nice way to put it

Now do it with code

I'm wrestling with this right now. I only use LLMs for design and exploration because I am not employed and can't pay for a subscription right now, and they make the design phase feel like less of a fever dream because checking my ideas doesn't involve hours of scanning search results online and trying to see how my ideas fit with what exists or trying to evaluate if my ideas even make sense, so I feel more encouraged to get started on working, but I often wonder if the prompts are being sycophants

In one case recently I explained a garbage collector design I had been toying with a while ago, but couldn't find research related to my idea or really evaluate if my idea would work. After enough arguing with the prompt it finally "understood", started praising my "novelty", and when I later asked for research related to it I was given a paper that already implemented most of my idea

It was a funny moment of seeing how it was clearly trained on too many online forum comments (simply mentioning reference counting got it on this whole awkward line of false folklore about memory management) before switching to sycophancy, to finally showing me a paper

A lot of code ends up being easy to factor out into small pieces for tests. I can't speak for Haskell but coming from another ML with eager evaluation step debugging works as you would expect