I’m attending the Emerging Languages Conference here in Portland, OR, where I ran into Joe Pamer on the F# team. I’ve been following F# for a while but have had trouble running it on the Mac.

Joe says his team at Microsoft runs into these issues often with users and was kind enough to walk me through the steps to get F# running on the mac.

First install Mono, there’s a dmg

1. Download the zip file 2. Run make_package.sh

This will complain about not finding dpkg-buildpackage but the dll will be signed with the mono key and be ready to use.

Assembly bin/FSharp.Core.dll signed.
./make_package.sh: line 19: dpkg-buildpackage: command not found

Now run gacutil which will install the assembly into mono’s library path.

sudo gacutil -i ./fsharp/bin/FSharp.Core.dll

And now you’re ready to write some programs! There are some known bugs around how it interacts with mono winforms (I think that’s a thing, it’s greek to me) so we’ll turn that off.

Now let’s fire up the repl, run an expression, and exit.

$ mono fsharp/bin/fsi.exe -gui
Microsoft® F# 2.0 Interactive build 2.0.0.0
Copyright © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
For help type #help;;
> printf “hi\n”;;
hi
val it : unit = ()
> #q;;

- Exit…

Joe says that they are working on getting DMGs up for Mac users ASAP. (within days)