I tried using the safe stack, but it seemed like it wasn't up to date with the latest version of .NET. Is that normal? Or did I hit a weird edge case in the ecosystem? (Or was it a case of PEBKAC?)
Yes you're right that they are a little behind. Currently on .Net 6. That is a shame as .Net 7 seems to have made significant improvements to performance.
That said I don't think there are any features that I'm missing out on being at .Net 6.
I think there is a limited number of maintainers of the SAFE template so they might not be able to keep on the bleeding edge. But it's not that hard to update the components to the latest versions. As can be seen on this waiting pull request https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE-template/pull/564
I should also mention that when I've hit issues with packages not working on the latest .Net version I've asked in the F# slack and twice had the maintainers fix things within a day so it would run at the latest version.
I found the Slack channel to be pretty responsive and friendly. Still, I was a bit bummed because I kept running into issues. Some documentation links were broken and I tried to fix them, but I couldn't get the project to build on Debian. I tried safe stack and had the wrong version of .NET. Once I got the right one, I had issues running the project (turned out the path did not support the "#" character). A lot of the documentation assumed you knew the .NET ecosystem, but I was coming from python. It seemed like I kept hitting sharp edges.
I'm still curious about F#. It has a lot of neat looking features (units of measure, computation expressions, active patterns) and has some of the easiest to read code I've seen. I just don't know if my experience was representative or if it was abnormal. :/
Yeah the .NET learning curve is steep. It's a little worse than some other languages out there. I found the same thing. I came from a Linux background, PHP, Perl and similar.
