The one thing I'm most certain of is that popularity in software development doesn't correlate with merit. This is unfortunate because approaches that are superior are generally overlooked in favor of gimped alternatives from big names like Google and Apple.
IntelliFactory have been strong at F# for over a decade now and if you have yet to use an ML like F# in anger yet, you just can't know what you are missing on.
Publishing software under an open source license is not sufficient to have a community grow around it. It requires commitment and efforts. It seems Intellifactory has chosen to focus on their paying customer, which is a choice they absolutely have the right to do. Sadly for open source developers, it makes using their software a hard choice.
I really would have liked it to be otherwise, their software seems to be top notch!
The SAFE Stack is slightly different in that in itself it's not a technology as such, aside from the .NET template that we a lot of invest time into. Instead, it brings together several distinct technologies that when pieced together form an excellent end-to-end stack.
I would say that SAFE seems to currently have a larger community movement around it (as well as a commercial support aspect for those people that want / need that).
SAFE Stack doesn't support WASM though - the client side story is instead built on top of the excellent Fable (an F#-to-Babel-to-Javascript transpiler). In this regard I think SAFE is also slightly different to WebSharper in that (from when I last tried WS out at least) WS is more of a complete framework whereas SAFE contains a number of libraries and components that you can opt in / out of as you see fit and lives a bit closer on the JS ecosystem side (again, happy to be corrected here on the WS side).
Both Websharper and SAFE stack are excellent stacks, and both encourage the use of F# end-to-end - try them both out and see what fits better for you :)
I'm curious why it is dead. The account has only posted two comments, both technical comments on F# threads, and both are dead. It has no submissions. So how did it get killed?
As for declarative UI development I had worked with Formlets -> Piglets -> UI.Next and felt they had nailed it at the end. I haven't worked with Elm, my hopes are high. The only other thing I know likely has a good model would be: https://github.com/calmm-js
Personally, couldn't hate Angular more, I worked with it enough and unlikely to do so again.
I tried running this snippet: http://www.fssnip.net/7VB/title/Enumerating-the-Rationals
Problems I ran into:
* BigInteger isn't available, even though it's part of F# core and I opened System.Numerics.
* Syntax coloring failed when I defined static member (* ). It seemed to think that (* opened a comment that was never closed. (Sorry, HN formatting prevents me from typing the correct inline multiplication override.)
