As part of the WebSharper web server effort, I have been writing an HTTP request parser. Tuning the parser for performance for the common simple case (small, correct HTTP request) has improved performance 8-fold, from 30K to 250K sample requests parsed every second on a single core of my Core i3. Let me review what I have learned from this. Indexing Accessing array elements goes through a bounds check. Unmanaged C++ code clearly wins here. C# has unsafe regions, but F# does not. So what can we do in [...]

I have implemented a simple web server in F#. The idea was to try to marry .NET asynchronous socket operations with F# async. Result: F# async seems to be the right tool for the job of webserver implementation: it makes asynchronous programming intuitive without adding too much performance overhead. The server executes 3500 keep-alive or 1000 normal request per second on my Core i3 machine, compared to 2500/500 requests per second using IIS or System.Net.HttpListener. Asynhronous Socket Operations Worki[...]

I wrap asynchronous .NET socket methods in F# Async and benchmark a simple webserver clocking at 3500 requests/second. Read more.

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Writing compilers is not a really a niche activity. If you think of it, every programmer is doing precisely that, defining a specific language for a given domain and then explaining its semantics to the computer. F#, ML and Haskell programmers know that union types are a life-saver for dealing with languages systematically. These types do, however, sometimes grow large, becoming less and less nice to work with. If a 30-case recursive union type, or 2-3 co-recursive 20-30 case union types, is something[...]