Building Concurrent Apps with F#

One stumbling block that developers encounter with asynchronous programming is that they become so concerned with getting concurrency right that they forget the core simplicity of the program.

F# lets you separate simple programs from the concurrent control flow and reveal the simplicity and readability of your core program.

In the October 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine, Chance Coble demonstrates building asynchronous expressions in F# and how to incorporate your own frameworks into simple asynchronous primitives.

Be sure to check our MSDN Magazine archives for more articles about parallel programming and concurrency.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2008
  In the referenced article Coble illustrates the use of some parallel primitives to construct a "first" function -- which returns the frist value returned from among an array of asynch computations. While it is "clear" how this works (after gettings one's mind turned around appropriately) what is NOT clear is if/how the remaining asynch computations are terminated once the "first" one does. My guess is that they are simply allowed to run to completion, but that their results are ignored. Have I misunderstood? If not then what would be the Right Thing to do in order to terminate the other computations?