F# and PLINQ extension methods

Question

While digging deeper into the latest release of F# I tried to have it interacting with PLINQ. I've noticed, however, that the two don't play very nice together code-wise. In fact it didn't seem possible to write code such as the following:

open System.Linq
let someArray = [|"abc"; "def"|]
someArray.AsParallel().Count(new Func<_,_>(fun s -> s.Length = 3))

because the extension methods for ParallelQuery contained in the System.Linq.ParallelEnumerable class didn't seem to get picked up by F#.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were no support for extension methods at all, but since I can access the someArray.Count extension method defined for IEnumerable I wonder why can't I access those of PLINQ.
Am I missing something?
Is this an F# limitation? If so, is it by desing? If not, will it be addressed in a future release?

Answer 1

If you're not yet using .NET 4.0, you can write that as:

#r "System.Threading"
open System.Linq

let someArray = [|"abc"; "def"|]

someArray.AsParallel<string>()
|> Seq.filter (fun s -> s.Length = 3)
|> Seq.length

Come .NET 4.0, you can just write:

let someArray = [|"abc"; "def"|]

someArray
|> Array.Parallel.filter (fun s -> s.Length = 3)
|> Array.length

F# prefers the use of the Seq module over Linq extension methods. There are some helper functions available, however, in the FSharp.PowerPack.Linq assembly.

Answer 2

If I remember correctly, getting PLINQ to work nicely with F# is on the to-do list of the development team at Microsoft, though I'm not sure it will appear in .NET 4.0. F# does however have Asynchronous Workflows, which is very similar to PLINQ (except it's based around list comprehensions instead, which is the standard functional way of doing things). I can't seem to find the article that mentions better support in F# for the Parallel Extensions (PLINQ/TPL), so don't quote me on it, but I'm pretty sure I saw it somewhere.

Apart from the MSDN page, this article seems like a good introduction to the topic.

There's also this blog series (Using PLINQ in F#) that might be handy to read if you prefer to use PLINQ over Async Workflows still.

Answer 3

Extension methods are just statics that take the object as the first parameter, so you should be able to call it with

ParallelEnumerable.AsParallel(someArray).Count(...)