Month: April 2019

F# from a C# Developers Perspective – Part 2

My customary warning on these posts: I am absolutely not a F# expert – these posts are about things that caught me out or surprised me as I begin to learn F# as an experienced C# developer. You can find part 1 here.

This is something that’s caught me out a lot while picking up F#. A typical function in F# might look like this:

let multiply valueOne =
	let userInput = int(System.Console.ReadLine())
	valueOne * userInput

Now how about a parameterless function, is it this:

let multiply =
	let valueOne = int(System.Console.ReadLine())
	let valueTwo = int(System.Console.ReadLine())
	valueOne * valueTwo

In short: no. This is not a function – the code will execute once and the result be assigned to the immutable constant multiply. To make this a function you need to add parentheses:

let multiply () =
	let valueOne = int(System.Console.ReadLine())
	let valueTwo = int(System.Console.ReadLine())
	valueOne * valueTwo

As both are perfectly valid syntax the compiler will process them without warning, it has no way of divining your intent. In this case you’ll probably notice the issue because of the need for user input but I had a really puzzling situation with the setting of the consoles foreground colour which never seemed to quite do what I expected. Needless to say – I’d made this mistake!

Posted in F#

F# from a C# Developers Perspective – Part 1

Note: for those waiting for me to post more videos about Function Monkey they are on the way, I’m on a working / cycling holiday in Mallorca and don’t really have the setup to record decent audio.

While I’m still a complete beginner with F# and very much in the heavy learning phase I thought it might be interesting to write about some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

I can’t stress enough that I’m a beginner with this stuff – so hopefully while its interesting please don’t treat the examples shown as great usage of F#, rather observations made on my way to gaining a better understanding.

A good place to start might be with writing the F# equivalent of this simple and fairly typical C# construct:

internal class Program
{
    private static int ProcessInput(string input, int state)
    {
        int newState = state;
        switch (input)
        {
            case "A": newState = state + 1;
                break;
            case "M": newState = state * 2;
                break;
        }

        Console.WriteLine(newState);
        return newState;
    }
    
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        bool shouldQuit = false;
        int state = 0;
        
        while (!shouldQuit)
        {
            string input = Console.ReadLine().ToUpper();
            shouldQuit = input == "Q";
            if (!shouldQuit)
            {
                state = ProcessInput(input, state);
            }
        }
    }
}

Essentially keep looping and processing user input until the user signals they’re done. My first attempt at this looked very much like the C# equivalent:

open System

[<EntryPoint>]
let main argv =
    let processInputs value input =
        let newValue = match input with
            | "A" -> value + 1
            | "M" -> value * 2
            | _ -> value
        printf "%d\n" newValue
        newValue
        
    let mutable shouldQuit = false
    let mutable state = 0
    while not shouldQuit do
        let input = System.Console.ReadLine().ToUpper()
        shouldQuit <- input = "Q"
        state <- match shouldQuit with
            | true -> state
            | false -> processInputs state input
            
    0 // return an integer exit code

As you might know, in F# data is immutable by default and use of the mutable keyword is a smell – it may sometimes be necessary but its a good sign you’re going about something in a none F# way.

One way to solve this would be to replace the while loop with a recursive function however in this case the recursion is essentially unbounded as it depends on user input. To a C# mindset that is something likely to blow the stack with a good old StackOverflowException. Here’s an example of a recursive approach written in C# and the stack trace that results in the debugger after a few key presses:

class Program
{
    private static int ProcessInput(string input, int state)
    {
        int newState = state;
        switch (input)
        {
            case "A": newState = state + 1;
                break;
            case "M": newState = state * 2;
                break;
        }

        Console.WriteLine(newState);
        return newState;
    }

    private static int RecursiveLoop(int state)
    {
        string input = Console.ReadLine()?.ToUpper();
        if (input == "Q")
        {
            return state;
        }

        return RecursiveLoop(ProcessInput(input, state));
    }
    
    static int Main(string[] args)
    {
        return RecursiveLoop(0);
    }
}

Here’s the same code written in F#, with the mutable keyword eradicated, and the stack trace after a few key presses:

open System

[<EntryPoint>]
let main _ =
    let processInput value input =
        let newValue = match input with
            | "A" -> value + 1
            | "M" -> value * 2
            | _ -> value
        printf "%d\n" newValue
        newValue
        
    let rec inputTailLoop state =
        let input = System.Console.ReadLine().ToUpper()
        match input with
            | "Q" -> state
            | _ -> inputTailLoop (processInput state input)
            
    let startingState = 0
    let finishingState = inputTailLoop startingState
    finishingState

The stack has not grown! So what’s going on?

The recursive functions, in both C# and F#, are examples of something called tail recursion. Tail recursion occurs when the very last operation a function performs is to call itself and when this occurs their is no need to preserve any data on the stack.

The F# compiler, unlike the C# compiler, recognises this and essentially is able to treat the recursive method as an iteration and avoid the stack growth and by doing so it enables us to solve a whole new class of problems without requiring mutable data.

Having posted about this on Twitter this prompted some discussion amongst the F# wizards about how tail recursion is also generally considered an anti-pattern and Isaac Abraham came through with an example as to how this could be solved using F# sequences as shown below (my butchered version of his original!):

open System

[<EntryPoint>]
let main _ =
    let processInput value input =
        let newValue = match input with
            | "A" -> value + 1
            | "M" -> value * 2
            | _ -> value
        printf "%d\n" newValue
        newValue
    
    let inputs = seq {
        while true do
            yield System.Console.ReadLine()
    }
    let startingState = 0
    let finishingState =
        inputs
        |> Seq.map (fun input -> input.ToUpper())
        |> Seq.takeWhile (fun input -> not(input = "Q"))
        |> Seq.fold processInput startingState
    
    finishingState

Essentially what we’ve done here is be explicit about the iteration that was implicit in the tail recursion. I’d used the Seq namespace quite heavily but I’m not sure I’d have made the leap to using the seq { } construct to solve this problem without Isaac’s help (thank you!).

For anyone interested I’m writing a simple version of the classic Star Trek game to teach myself F#. The code is, I’m sure, woeful and it gets refactored massively almost daily at the moment – but you’re welcome to take a look, it’s on GitHub.

Finally I’d like to stress again – I’m an absolute beginner at F# so please, please, don’t use the code above as exemplars but rather curios!

Posted in F#

App Center and React Native Upgrades

I hit a very strange problem recently with Microsoft App Centre which I’ve been happily using to build and distribute a React Native app that was sat at version 0.55.

React Native 0.55 -> 0.56 was quite a big change as it adopted the new Xcode build system and bumped the minimum node version.

I needed to update the app to be compatible with Apple’s requirements and so spent some time moving it along to React Native 0.59. All seemed to be going fine and I was able to run a build through App Centre from my development / feature branch.

I merged this into master, did a diff to ensure my feature and master branches were identical, and pushed it to App Centre. And the build assigned to this branch failed – for some reason it wasn’t selecting the correct node version and I saw this error:

error react-native@0.59.3: The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=8.3". Got "6.17.0"

The build definitions were identical and the source code was identical, I checked the App Centre agent version and it was the same too. I spent some time with a support team member who was helpful but ultimately as confused as me and attempted to force the node version selection with a post clone script. That didn’t work either but gave me a different error. An error that suggested that the build was now using node 8.

I scratched my head for a while and realised what I’d done. I’d opened the build definition and pressed save after adding the post clone script. You need to do this to get App Centre to see new and updated custom build scripts.

Of course it then dawned on me – App Centre isn’t figuring out the node version to use after cloning – its doing it at the same time it looks for custom build scripts. When you press save on a build definition. And I’d almost certainly inspected the build definition (looking for things I might need to change) on the first branch I tried and hit save.

I removed the post clone script and everything worked as expected.

Well perhaps not as expected – this really isn’t helpful behaviour from App Centre, confusing to both users and support staff, that hopefully they will resolve. You really expect your project to be built based on its assets at the time of build – not part from this and part from what is effectively the result of inspecting an earlier snapshot.

Function Monkey 2.1.0

I’ve just pushed out a new version of Function Monkey with one fairly minor but potentially important change – the ability to create functions without routes.

You can now use the .HttpRoute() method without specifying an actual route. If you then also specify no path on the .HttpFunction<TCommand>() method that will result in an Azure Function with no route specified – it will then be named in the usual way based on the function name, which in the case of Function Monkey is the command name.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the approach I’ve taken to this at an API level but didn’t want to break anything – next time I plan a set of breaking changes I’ll probably look to clean this up a bit.

The reason for this is to support Logic Apps. Logic Apps only support routes with an accompanying Swagger / OpenAPI doc and you don’t necessarily want the latter for your functions.

While I was using proxies HTTP functions had no route and so they could be called from Logic Apps using the underlying function (while the outside world would use the shaped endpoint exposed through the proxy).

Having moved to a proxy-less world I’d managed to break a production Logic App of my own because the Logic App couldn’t find the function (404 error). Redeployment then generated a more meaningful error – that routed functions aren’t supported. Jeff Hollan gives some background on why here.

I had planned a bunch of improvements for 2.1.0 (which I’ve started) which will now move to 2.2.0.

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