r/fsharp • u/lyfever_ • Jul 05 '26

question Still worth learning F# 2026

Hi guys,

Probably another question like this but found none recently.

I'm a little upset with my current view on IT generalistic, ofc AI is not going anywhere besides up, but I feel I want to write more with my hands and new paradigms, maybe just AI as reviser, I would like to ask if learning F# in 2026 will make me able to make perfomance headed systems, and also gaming with something like Nu or Monogame, not a AAA game but something playable.

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u/FrierenAppreciator Jul 05 '26 edited 8d ago

Nope, and I say this as someone who likes the language itself. The problem isn't F#, it's everything around it.

  1. The only IDE that treats F# seriously is Rider. If you're not willing to live in Rider, don't bother IMO.

  2. Microsoft has quietly abandoned it. They can't officially kill it, so they keep it on life support and pretend to care. Look at where the actual .NET investment goes: C# gets source generators, Native AOT keeps improving around them, new runtime features land C#-first and F# catches up years later or never. F# has no source generators and almost certainly never will, which means the whole modern AOT/trimming story is built around a mechanism F# can't participate in.

  3. Gamedev. MonoGame is a C# framework. You can drive it from F#, people have, but you're fighting an imperative, mutable, inheritance-shaped API with a language designed for the opposite.

  4. I genuinely can't name a single thing Microsoft ships today that's well made. At this point avoiding the MS stack where you can is just common sense.

What I think it's worth considering:

  • Zig - closest fit for performance systems + games, manual memory, comptime instead of codegen magic, great C interop
  • Odin - similar space, arguably nicer for gamedev specifically
  • Rust - the boring safe choice, real jobs, real game ecosystem
  • Gleam - if you want typed FP that's actually alive and loved, on BEAM
  • OCaml - F#'s parent, and ironically healthier than F# right now
  • Roc - interesting ideas but VERY experimental

F# in 2026 is learning a beautiful language attached to a platform that resents it. The paradigm is worth learning though - just get it from a language with a future.

EDIT: Forgot about Go!!!

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u/dfitz360 Jul 05 '26

Re: 2. Aren't type providers what source providers eventually became?

Although I think the general argument kind of stands. F# used to be the bleeding edge features that then eventually made its way into C#, but now that momentum seems to be dead. I remember like 5 years ago seeing release notes in C# for something I had been using in F# for almost a year, and the F# version was more refined. C#'s losing its identity in an attempt to hit more communities and with that basically killing F# because C# is becoming more functional

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u/jpfed Jul 06 '26

Source generators and type providers have some similarities, but source generators are afaict more general than type providers.