I've been putting time into learning functional programming and I've come to the part where I want to start writing a project instead of just dabbling in tutorials/examples.

While doing my research, I've found that Erlang seems to be a pretty powerful when it comes to writing concurrent software (which is my goal), but resources and tools for development aren't as mature as Microsoft development products.

F# can run on linux (Mono) so that requirement is met, but while looking around on the internet I cannot find any comparisons of F# vs Erlang. Right now, I am leaning towards Erlang just because it seems to have the most press, but I am curious if there is really any performance difference between the two languages.

Since I am use to developing in .NET, I can probably get up to speed with F# a lot faster than Erlang, but I cannot find any resource to convince me that F# is just as scalable as Erlang.

I am most interested in simulation, which is going to be firing a lot of quickly processed messages to persistant nodes.

If I have not done a good job with what I am trying to ask, please ask for more verification.