What is Reddit's opinion of F# for Scientists?

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Definitely cli apps, webapps or anything where .NET is in general. From a language perspective it lends itself very good to math. Im not sure however around what the ecosystem around scientific computing is around F# . At least someone wrote a book about it https://www.amazon.com/F-Scientists-Jon-Harrop/dp/0470242116

> Would it transpile ALL of my code into JS? Wouldn’t that degrade performance?

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If you implemented your numerical computations in the Fable app, yes, most likely. Although JavaScript can be used to write performant desktop applications - for instance, Visual Studio Code - I don't think it would be a good fit for scientific computing. The use case for Fable is in having behaviorally-sophisticated UIs without having to run through the dynamically/weakly-typed mess that is JavaScript. That said, JavaScript is not a terribly slow language - the Node.js JavaScript runtime is typically faster than Python. And Fable has Electron bindings for creating desktop apps. It could be worth trying. But I imagine a transpiled F# program would be noticeably slower than having one run in the .NET Framework or .NET Core runtime.

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You really want to think of this as a UI layer on top of a computation layer. For a web application, the UI is typically run client-side in JavaScript (the browser sends .JS code to its JavaScript runtime, or in the very simplest case is only an HTML renderer), while the server code is some other language (F#, C++, PHP, etc) that sends user-facing data to the JavaScript. For a .NET desktop application, it'll all be bundled and run in the same place, but typically with a separate frontend project and a backend project. Unfortunately, either way it'll be a bit of work. And I think we'd need a bit more information about your code to give a good answer - for starters, is this Windows, or Linux? .NET Framework or .NET Core?

• Honestly, using Windows.Forms or Eto Forms is the easiest way to solve the problem of "add a GUI to my F#." Compile your numerical code to a class library and create a separate project for the UI which references that library, then call the numeric functions you need from the UI.
  • /u/Mischala suggested the standard way F# devs add user interfaces to their desktop applications: in Visual Studio, C# desktop UIs can be built visually using the Forms designer, which is a tool that F# unfortunately lacks. The designer automates what would be extremely ugly and tedious code and lets you drag things around on a screen to build out your UI. Since C# and F# interoperate fairly nicely, you can reference your F# project from C# and call your functions directly. I imagine this would be the fastest way to add pictures and buttons.
  • If you don't want to get your hands dirty with C# - who would blame you :) - then it's really not that hard to write a forms application purely in F#. I am assuming, given your userbase, that aesthetics are a low priority, so you wouldn't need to learn anything fancy or play too much with resizing.etc. Here are some tutorials to get you started:
    • The book F# For Scientists has an excellent introduction to using Windows.Forms in Chapter 7. Unfortunately it is out of print, but I snagged a copy fairly cheap on Amazon.
    • Expert F# 4.0 has a chapter using Eto. I have not played around with this but it looks more F# friendly than Windows.Forms - plus, there are tutorials in F#. It's also cross-platform
    • https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/f5b919/windows-form-application-in-fsharp/
      
    • https://emmorrisonjr.wordpress.com/code-tutorials/f-tutorials/creating-a-simple-f-windows-forms-application-using-visual-studio-2010/
• Like /u/Mischala said, turning your existing F# code into a webserver isn't a bad option.
  • Note that it doesn't actually have to be a real webserver hosted externally; an ASP.NET Core app is just a console application, and you can use the (amazing) Fable.Remoting library to have a webpage-based UI talk to the CLI console application.
  • Unfortunately you'll have a lot of useless boilerplate and overhead. Still, I think this would be the easiest way to use Fable for a high-performance desktop application. The Giraffe framework is both relatively easy to use and a lot of fun, and Visual Studio has an ASP.NET Core F# template out-of-the-box.
• You could try forking Fable.Remoting and modify it to have it chat to a desktop application directly. This might be easy, but I don't know enough about JS to endorse it.

Since you're studying Mathematics, you might be better off looking at functional programming,rather then OOP. F# from Microsoft offers both functional and OOP. A good introduction is F# for Scientists . As for performance, there are a number of benchmarks showing F# matching or beating equivalent C++ programs.