But why? I mean, F# is a great language, but there are so much options for non-Windows systems with better tooling and ecosystem and larger communities etc.

F# is my primary language because it is the best on MS stack.

Surprisingly (actually not) lack of functors makes the language completely different.

Indeed, I agree with you.

Object-orientation support on OCaml also sets it far apart from SML, for instance. Which can lead to a lengthy discussion, but that's beside the point.

This reasoning, however, is exactly my point: depending on where emphasis is placed, they can be argued to be similar or completely different languages.

Don't be very optimistic about Russia. Things are even worse here, but local and worldwide ignorance presenting the problem as non-existent.

As for whistleblowers — it's all about politics and “your enemy is my friend” between States and Russan rustlers.

Why would they bother? There is a local version of PRISM named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM">SORM</a> deployed at every provider.

Not yet. The most popular shop Svyaznoy seems like promoting however.

Unlimited mobile internet is $13(Beeline) — $20 (MTS) per month in Moscow region. Quality is far from good, can't compare to other countries though.

Not a single Russian iPhone user I know bought it in carrier store. Mostly they've got it from Europe trips, others in non-official stores where prices 15-20% lower.

So, despite official sales numbers are low, there is a remarkable iPhone user base here.

I guess that's why Feedly is down...

Lambda the Ultimate is moving to Facebook: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4709

Are you using default garbage collector, or switched to SGen? http://www.mono-project.com/Generational_GC

You may have memory usage problems http://stackoverflow.com/a/8766427/55209

Thanks a lot for bringing this up. After load testing a whole bunch today I was definitely seeing unexpected memory usage and unbounded growth.

I also ported my app to Nancy and load tested it as well. The performance was about the same and the memory usage grew as well but it seemed to eventually stop growing.

After reading a lot and trying (unsuccessfully) to make fastcgi-mono-server4 use mono-sgen I just gave up and went the console app self hosting route (using Nancy).

With self hosting my memory stays ultra low and doesn't grow. It also sped up the app quite significantly. My previous benchmarks were 10,000 requests served in 35-45 seconds (using fastcgi-mono-server4) and now I'm seeing 16-18 seconds (self hosting).

So yeah, self hosting is the way to go it seems.