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F# runtime in future versions of Silverlight
f#silverlight

Here's a tough one:

FSharp.Core.dll is 914KB. That's pretty big, and means that a Silverlight application on, say, a 100kb/s connection, can take 9 seconds longer to download.

Compiling a simple program (printfn "hello") with --standalone still makes the program 900+kb.

Silverlight's small size of 3MB is one of its selling points, so tacking on another MB is probably not an option.

Is there any consideration going into this problem? Can --standalone maybe be optimized? Can it be made to compile smaller runtime .dlls that all the projects in the solution can use?

.

Yup, it can be an issue. The FSharp.Core size you mention is even after we cut the size in about half (it used to be more like 2MB or something back in Beta2). :)

If you haven't already, see

[link:www.wintellect.com]

and learn about the caching features in Silverlight ('transparent platform extensions' maybe is the label?). Basically my understanding (I've yet to author a silverlight app myself) is if you're using the project templates, you'll end up with a xap for the app and a xap for FSharp.Core, and so e.g. if a client browser hits your web site multiple times, or hits multiple silverlight apps on your site, the client only needs to download the xap with FSharp.Core once, and then can reuse it. So this mitigates things a bit.

That said, we'd love to make the assembly smaller, and I expect we'll continue to work towards that goal in future releases as part of overall performance improvements.

By on 3/11/2010 5:53 PM ()

That's good to know.

I wish you luck in finding optimizations.

By on 3/13/2010 4:02 PM ()

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