"The F# Asynchronous Programming Model" by Don Syme et al.

The creator of the F# programming language at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Don Syme, recently had a paper accepted for the Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages conference. This paper provides a great introduction to asynchronous workflows and the MailboxProcessor in F#.

In fact, the use of monads to sequence asynchronous operations has a long history. For example, this approach has been used in the OCaml programming language, from which F# is descended, for at least 8 years. Specifically, Jérôme Vouillon's LWT library for OCaml made asynchronous programming easy. For example, the first F# sample given in this paper:

async { let! html = getWebPage "http://www.google.com"
        return html.Length }

Could have been written in OCaml as follows in 2002:

getWebPage "http://www.google.com" >>=
String.length

In 2005, Jacques Carette et al.'s pa_monad syntax extension even added the same kind of syntactic sugar that F# provides for its asynchronous workflows, allowing the sample to be written in OCaml as:

perform
  html <-- getWebPage "http://www.google.com"
  return String.length html

For more information on asynchronous programming in F#, read Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing.

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