Blog posts exploring the concept "Native-Compilation"
← Back to all tagsBlog posts exploring the concept "Native-Compilation"
← Back to all tagsWhen we set out to design the Firefly compiler for the Fidelity Framework, one of our core goals was to produce truly minimal native executables. In the world of traditional .NET development, your “Hello World” application carries the weight of the entire runtime and referenced assemblies, resulting in deployments measured in megabytes. For embedded systems, high-frequency trading platforms, or any scenario where every byte matters, this overhead is unacceptable. Our solution involves a revolutionary approach: type-aware tree shaking that operates directly on the F# Compiler Services AST, preserving rich type information to guide precise dead code elimination.
Read MoreThe Firefly compiler represents a fundamental shift in how F# code gets compiled to native executables. Unlike traditional F# compilation that relies on pre-compiled assemblies and the .NET runtime, Firefly compiles F# directly to native code through MLIR and LLVM, creating truly dependency-free executables. This architectural choice creates an interesting challenge: how do we handle library dependencies when we can’t rely on traditional assembly resolution? Beyond Assembly-Based Dependencies Traditional F# development uses a well-established pattern where open statements resolve to compiled assemblies in NuGet packages.
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 computing landscape has undergone seismic shifts over the past three decades, yet many of our foundational software platforms remain anchored to paradigms established during a vastly different technological era. Virtual machines and managed runtime environments like Java’s JVM and .NET’s CLR emerged during the late 1990s and early 2000s as solutions to very specific problems of that time: platform independence, memory safety, and simplified development in an era of relatively homogeneous computing resources.
Read MoreThe journey from managed code to native compilation in F# represents a significant architectural shift. As the Fidelity Framework charts a course toward bringing F# to new levels of hardware/software co-design, we face a fundamental question: how do we distribute and manage packages in a world where the comfortable-yet-constraining assumptions afforded in the .NET ecosystem no longer hold? This article explores Fargo, a forward-looking package management system that reimagines F# code distribution for the age of multi-platform native compilation.
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.
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