Blog posts exploring the concept "Functional-Programming"
← Back to all tagsBlog posts exploring the concept "Functional-Programming"
← Back to all tagsThe industry is witnessing an unprecedented $4 billion investment to finally set aside the 80-year-old Harvard/Von Neumann computer design pattern. Companies like NextSilicon, Groq, and Tenstorrent are building novel, alternative architectures that eliminate the traditional bottlenecks between memory and program execution. Yet compiler architectures remain trapped in antiquated patterns - forcing stilted relationships into artificial constructions, obscuring the natural alignment with the emerging dominance of dataflow patterns. What if the key to targeting both traditional and revolutionary architectures lies not in choosing sides, but in recognizing that programs are “hypergraphs” by nature?
Read MoreIn the landscape of modern compiler design, a fundamental tension exists between preserving the elegance of high-level abstractions and generating efficient machine code. The Fidelity framework confronts this challenge head-on. By leveraging a powerful insight, referential transparency, the Firefly compiler provides a natural decision point for compilation strategies. At the heart our F# native compiler lies the Program Hypergraph (PHG), which analyzes code to identify any referentially transparent regions. This analysis drives a sophisticated compilation strategy that chooses between two powerful computational models: interaction nets for pure, parallel computations and delimited continuations for effectful, sequential operations.
Read MoreModern async and parallel programming presents an engineering challenge: we need both the performance of low-level control and the safety of high-level abstractions. Nearly 20 years ago, the .NET ecosystem pioneered the async/await syntactic pattern, making concurrent code accessible to millions of developers and influencing other technology stacks in following years. However, this pattern comes with tradeoffs - runtime machinery that, while powerful, can become opaque when we need to understand or optimize workload behavior.
Read MoreWhen we set out to build Firefly, we faced a fundamental question that cuts to the heart of functional systems programming: how far down the compilation stack can we preserve the elegant abstractions that make F# powerful? Specifically, can delimited continuations - the theoretical foundation for async/await, generators, and algebraic effects - survive the journey from high-level F# through MLIR’s SSA form to executable code? And perhaps more importantly, should they?
Read MoreIn 1998, Andrew Appel published a paper that heralded a change to how we should think about compiler design. “SSA is Functional Programming” demonstrated that Static Single-Assignment form, the intermediate representation at the heart of modern optimizing compilers, is exactly equivalent to functional programming with nested lexical scope. This insight has profound implications as we enter a new era of hardware-software co-design. At SpeakEZ, this revelation validates our approach with the Fidelity framework more than 25 years after its first publication: lowering F# to native code through MLIR isn’t just possible, it’s aligned to the fundamental structure of well-principled compilation.
Read MoreThe computing industry stands at a fascinating juncture in 2025. After decades of general-purpose processor dominance that led to the accidental emergence of general purpose GPU, we’re witnessing what appears to be a reverse inflection point. Specialized architectures are re-emerging as an economic imperative, but with crucial differences from the LISP machines of the past. Our analysis examines how languages inheriting from LISP’s legacy, particularly F# and others with lineage to OCaml and StandardML, are uniquely positioned to realize the advantages of new hardware coming from vendors like NextSilicon, Groq, Cerebras and Tenstorrent: a concept we’re calling Dataflow Graph Architecture (DGA).
Read MoreThe Fidelity Framework faces a fascinating challenge: how do we identify opportunities for massive parallelism hidden within sequential-looking F# code? The answer lies in an elegant application of graph coloring to our Program Hypergraph (PHG), using bidirectional zippers to traverse and analyze control flow and data flow patterns. This approach, inspired by insights from Ramsey graph theory, enables automatic discovery of where async and continuation-based code can be transformed into interaction nets for parallel execution.
Read MoreSoftware tools face an eternal tension: wait to build fast executables or speed up workflow at the cost of the end result. Traditional approaches have forced developers to choose between aggressive optimization (and long compilation cycles) that produces efficient code versus rapid compilation cycles often yield code bloat. What if we could have both? Or rather, what if we could have the choice that matters when it matters most? The answer lies in understanding something most programmers miss about functional programming:
Read MoreThe debate over higher-kinded types (HKTs) in F# reveals fundamental tensions between theoretical elegance and practical accessibility. This analysis examines these tensions through two lenses: first, Don Syme’s philosophical stance that has shaped standard F#, and second, how the Fidelity framework’s unique position as a native F# compiler might change this calculus. The goal is to understand both perspectives while considering whether Fidelity’s different constraints warrant a different approach. For readers from different language communities, this analysis offers distinct insights.
Read MoreThe journey of creating a native UI framework for F# presents a fascinating challenge: how do we preserve the elegant, functional programming experience that F# developers love while compiling to efficient native code with (in most cases) zero heap allocations? As we build FidelityUI, the UI framework for the Fidelity ecosystem, we find ourselves at the intersection of functional programming ideals and systems programming realities. Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch.
Read MoreThe Fidelity framework introduces a revolutionary approach to building desktop applications with F#, enabling developers to create native user interfaces across multiple platforms while preserving the functional elegance that makes F# special. Drawing inspiration from the successful patterns established by Elmish and the MVU pattern - particularly within Avalonia - we take many lessons from Fabulous. FidelityUI adapts these proven approaches for native compilation, creating a framework that feels familiar to F# developers while delivering unprecedented performance through direct hardware access.
Read MoreThe “byref problem” in .NET represents one of the most fundamental performance bottlenecks in managed programming languages. While seemingly technical, this limitation cascades through entire application architectures, not only hijacking developer productivity but also forcing them into defensive copying patterns that can devastate performance in memory-intensive applications. The Fidelity framework doesn’t just solve this problem; our designs transform the limitation into the foundation for an entirely new approach to systems programming that maintains functional programming elegance while delivering hardware-level performance.
Read MoreHere at SpeakEZ we’re rethinking how developers interact with memory management in systems programming. The conventional wisdom suggests we face a stark choice: embrace the ubiquitous memory burdens of Rust or abdicate all memory concerns and accept the performance penalties of garbage collection. We believe there’s a better way. Mandatory vs. Optional Memory Management Rust’s borrow checker has revolutionized systems programming by statically preventing memory safety issues, but it comes at a significant cost: every line of code must consider ownership and borrowing.
Read MoreFor .NET developers, the term “frontend” already carries rich meaning. It might evoke XAML-based technologies like WPF or UWP, the hybrid approach of Blazor, or perhaps JavaScript visualization frameworks such as Angular, Vue or React. Within the .NET ecosystem, “frontend” generally refers to user interface technologies - the presentation layer of applications. When that same .NET developer encounters terminology like “MLIR C/C++ Frontend Working Group,” something doesn’t quite compute. This clearly isn’t referring to user interfaces or presentation technologies.
Read MoreThe promise of functional programming has always been apparent: write code that expresses a process to an end result, not how the machine should perform those actions. Yet for decades, this elegance came with a tax - runtime overhead, garbage collection pauses, and the implicit assumption that “real” systems programming belonged to C and its descendants. The Fidelity Framework challenges this assumption by asking a different question: What if we could preserve F#’s expressiveness, safety and precision while compiling to native code that rivals hand-written C in efficiency?
Read MoreThe Fidelity framework aims to create a novel approach to building desktop applications with F#, enabling developers to create native user interfaces across multiple platforms while preserving functional elegance. One of the key challenges in building such a framework is developing a robust layout system that maintains the functional programming paradigm while providing the flexibility and power of established UI frameworks. This article explores how Fidelity can incorporate ideas from modern functional UI frameworks to create a pure F# implementation of a window layout system without external dependencies, relying solely on F# native code and integrated low level LVGL and Skia libraries.
Read MoreThe computing world has fragmented into specialized ecosystems - embedded systems demand byte-level control, mobile platforms enforce strict resource constraints, while server applications require elasticity and parallelism. Traditionally, these environments have forced developers to choose between conflicting approaches: use a high-level language with garbage collection and accept the performance overhead, or drop down to systems programming with manual memory management and lose expressiveness. Beyond Runtime Boundaries The Fidelity Framework represents a fundamental rethinking of this dichotomy.
Read MoreErlang emerged in the late 1980s at Ericsson, during an epoch when distributed systems were in their infancy and reliability was becoming a critical concern in telecommunications. Born out of the practical need to build telephone exchanges that could achieve the mythical “nine nines” (99.9999999%) of uptime, Erlang introduced a paradigm shift in how we approach concurrency and fault tolerance. A Pioneer in Reliable Distributed Computing In an era dominated by object-oriented programming and shared-state concurrency, Erlang boldly embraced functional programming with immutable data and the actor model.
Read MoreWhen Simon Peyton Jones, one of the creators of Haskell and a renowned researcher in functional programming, explains Excel, he frames it in a fascinating way: “the easiest way to get at functional programming is to think of spreadsheets.” This insight reveals a profound truth hiding in plain sight. While the programming world often debates the merits of functional programming versus object-oriented or imperative approaches, functional programming has quietly infiltrated mainstream computing in ways most users never realize.
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