Microsoft recently announced the general availability of F# 5 which ships with the latest release of .NET 5.

The company said that from F# 4.1 to F# 5, the focus for F# has been bringing up great support for .NET Core (now .NET 5).  F# 5 marks the start of a new era of F# evolution mainly around three main things, Interactive programming, Making analytical-oriented programming convenient and fun, and Great fundamentals and performance for functional programming on .NET.

F# 5 is the new default language version for the .NET SDK and Visual Studio. Any new or existing project compiled with either of those toolsets will use F# 5. It also brings support for package references in F# scripts with #r "nuget:..." syntax. Also, F# 5 is fully supported in Jupyter Notebooks, nteract, and VSCode Notebooks.

As part of this release, Microsoft provided some improvements includes String Interpolation, Support for nameof, Open Type declarations, Enhanced Slicing, Consistent behavior for built-in data types, Fixed-index slices for 3D and 4D arrays in FSharp.Core, F# quotations improvements, Applicative Computation Expressions, Improved stack traces in F# async and other computation expressions, Improved .NET interop, Improved runtime performance, Improved Map and Set performance in FSharp.Core, Improved compiler performance.

Visit the official website for more details.