Speed up F# compile with Reference Assembly

Question

I thought I'd try out speeding up my compiles with Reference Assemblies. So I add this to my projects:

    <ProduceReferenceAssembly>true</ProduceReferenceAssembly>
    <Deterministic>true</Deterministic>

But get a nasty error for my F# projects:

error : Expected file "obj\Debug\net5.0\ref\xyz.dll" does not exist.

It seems like F# doesn't support reference assemblies.

Will this be fixed?

Is there a way to do this with F# signature files?

Answer 1

It appears that your are correct that the F# compiler does not support reference assemblies. I could find no mention of them in the documentation of F# compiler options.

There is an open feature request to add this support at https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/issues/3066. You could comment on that, if you think this would be a good feature to add to the F# compiler.