Technical Term: Message-Passing

The story of distributed systems in F# begins with two distinct programming traditions that converge in F# in unique ways. From OCaml came the functional programming foundation and type system rigor. From Erlang came the mailboxprocessor and with it their ground-breaking approach to fault-tolerant distributed systems. And Don Syme’s innovations that fused true concurrency into the primitives of a high-level programming languages was a revelation. What emerged in F# was neither a simple port nor a mere combination, but something distinctly new: a language that could express actor-based concurrency with type safety, integrate with existing ecosystems, and compile to multiple target platforms.