This is post #30 of the English 2014 F# advent calendar. Thanks to Sergey Tihon for inviting me and suggesting the topic. Be sure to check out all the other awesome posts!

In this post I will be describing Vagrant, a dependency management library of mine. I will try to walk through some of the subtleties in the .NET framework that drove the library implementation, in an attempt to make it more accessible. All code and examples presented can be found in this repository.

Prelude

It is often claimed in functional programming that functions are treated as values. This is a valid assumption in simple applications, permitting powerful patterns when writing code. But is this a general truth, or simply a linguistic abstraction? If functions really are values, one would expect that they exhibit all properties normally expected of values. For instance, it should be possible to serialise functions…