Contract position in compiler development, also some snippets of F# news

[ Note - Applications for the contract position have now closed - thanks! ]

I meant to put this on my blog a while back, but it's not too late yet. Basically, we have a six month contract position available at the wonderful place where I work, the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, UK to work with myself and others on the F# compiler and tools. A copy of the full job description is here. 

On the F# front, I've been doing lots of work in preparation for further releases over the next few months. For example, I've been looking at the performance of F# code, including a number of micro-benchmarks as well as the performance of the bootstrapped compiler. I've also been ensuring that F# will work with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 (some changes were required with regard to collections), and ironing out some problems related to using F# with NGEN (the precompiler for .NET code). On the language design front I've been working with my colleagues to design constrained polymorphism for F#, which will appear in version 1.0.4: this is turning out very nicely and I'll write a tutorial blog entry on it in due course. 

I've also been having fun supporting the growing group of internal users of F#. For example, Andrew Phillips and Luca Cardelli's very cool simulator for the stochastic Pi calculus is now running on F#, and we were immediately able to use Windows Forms to put some great front-end graphical displays of the simulated data - this is exactly the kind of application I had in mind for F#. If you want to learn more about the fantastic emerging area of Systems Biology see Luca's Biocomputing pages. But first go back and read that Year 12 biology textbook again!