to those curious, erlang abstract form[1] is the AST representation used by the erlang compiler/etc. per [1], you can see that it's canonically made of erlang terms, and you have easy access to routines for manipulating this representation from the standard library; it's really comfy when you need it! it's also the target elixir compiles down to, and the representation manipulated by parse transforms, which in base erlang are the way syntactic sugar (notably qlc[2] and some of the more cutesy pattern matches in merl[3] (which, in turn, manipulates the very same representation to do its job. very meta!)) is done.
most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.
Erlang is one of those runtimes I've loved since learning about it all the way back in 2008, but I never took time to learn the syntax, but Elixir and Gleam have had me fiddling with the Erlang VM over the years. Happy to see Gleam growing into maturity.
ryan-duve 5 hours ago [-]
I just learned Erlang this year and I love the syntax. Ending expressions with periods took getting used to, but capital first letters distinguishing variables, non-rebindable variables, semicolons between function clauses, a lack of boilerplate (defmodule et al), a fraction of end keywords, commas separating expression, ... all make for a very fun to use and ergonomic language, IMO.
I haven't tried Gleam yet, though. I'm interested in the focus on simplicity but a little wary because I understand they sacrificed niceties to minimize the language footprint, e.g., pattern matching in function heads. I intend to give it a shot the next time I'm greenfielding something.
mahboi 1 hours ago [-]
Erlang is my favorite functional language out of all the ones I've tried. The matchers, guards, etc are all done very well. But I don't like functional. I used to think it was cool, gave it a real chance using Erlang for years, and eventually decided it's not a good fit for many use cases. Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring. It's not like CS algo homework, and even there you often want DP/memoization.
Edit: pure* functional
sodapopcan 22 minutes ago [-]
> Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring.
Odd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:
for a <- list, reduce: []
acc ->
[a | acc]
end
Not sure if there is something like that in Erlang (or Gleam for that matter).
mahboi 16 minutes ago [-]
If you already have a list in Erlang, you can use map and the foldl/foldr reducers. But there's no general for-loop. You're expected to use tail recursion.
Also tbh, I don't like reduce either. I agree with that article posted on HN a while back about devs not liking reduce. Just want to insert into my list or whatever.
macintux 1 hours ago [-]
I was fortunate enough to use Erlang professionally for a couple of years. I agree: the syntax is quite comfortable.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
I'm the same. I thought I was an oddball because so many people seemed to prefer Elixir but I like Erlang and its syntax. I wish I had more chances to use it at work but so far it's just been for hobby projects or playing with.
ch4s3 6 hours ago [-]
I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up but otherwise I'd try Elixir. You can learn most of the language in a few days and be experimenting with BEAM and supervision concepts basically on day one. As a learning exercise I think its worth peoples' time because actors/processes are one of the concurrency models you don't see everywhere but solve interesting problems well.
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's the case, Rust and Gleam have almost nothing in common beyond having static type systems, and those type systems are very different too.
You don't think that Gleam has more familiar syntax to a Rust dev than Elixir? Or that the type system might feel more familiar?
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
I think a Rust programmer is more likely to prefer Gleam to Elixir, but I don't think there is much link between Gleam and Rust, and I especially do not thing that Gleam should only be considered over Elixir if you are already a Rust programmer.
ch4s3 6 hours ago [-]
So I said:
> I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up
And you think that:
> a Rust programmer is more likely to prefer Gleam to Elixir
Are we maybe splitting hairs here?
trenchgun 6 hours ago [-]
You said:
>I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up but otherwise I'd try Elixir.
This is way too strong and narrow statement. Gleam is statically typed garbage collected language, closer to OCaml than Rust. Elixir if you like dynamically typed instead.
Tbh gradual typing sounds like a nightmare. Probably impossible to implement correctly, whatever your definition of "correctly".
lpil 5 hours ago [-]
It's very possible that I'm misunderstanding you! I'm mostly just saying that Gleam is very unlike Rust, so if you pick it or avoid it for Rust related reasons you may not be making the most informed decision.
The languages that Gleam is most like might be Standard ML, OCaml, Elm, and F#.
cweagans 5 hours ago [-]
You seem to be interpreting the statements as technical comparisons of the languages, but ch4s3 was (by my read) commenting on the overall ability of a programmer to jump from one language to another.
That is: they aren't similar languages on a technical level, but if you know Rust, you should be able to make the jump to Gleam pretty quickly.
lpil 4 hours ago [-]
Aye, I am saying that jumping from Rust to Gleam isn't easy because the languages are so different. "How do I do X in Gleam like I would in Rust" is one of the most common categories of support question from newcomers who assumed they were similar.
> The languages that Gleam is most like might be Standard ML, OCaml, Elm, and F#.
And guess which languages inspired several things in Rust.
lpil 4 hours ago [-]
The ML family clearly inspired Rust greatly, but the end result is very different.
bmitc 6 hours ago [-]
> I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up
I think by sentiments like this, people mean if you know unions, records, and pattern matching then you'll more easily pick up another language that has unions, records, and pattern matching.
ch4s3 6 hours ago [-]
Yep, that's essentially what I mean. There's even this official cheatsheet[1] that shows a lot of overlap.
Gleam is such a beautiful language. I wish I had the opportunity to use it more. If it could compile (transpile) to a native target like rust or go, it would be truly perfect.
rapnie 5 hours ago [-]
I would love to see support for wasm and wasi.
whalesalad 7 hours ago [-]
I am working on a language called blasphemy which intends to do this.
znpy 6 hours ago [-]
Looking forward to be able to claim to be “proficient in blasphemy” on my cv! /s
packetlost 7 hours ago [-]
I feel like Go would be a great backend target for Gleam
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
Go's garbage collection isn't well suited for an immutable language like Gleam, so the performance would likely be disappointing compared to other targets.
ch4s3 6 hours ago [-]
The concurrency model in Go is also poorly suited to the BEAM's process model. Goroutines share a heap so you can't do a lot of things safely that processes can do. Having independent memory space for a process allows you to free it safely when work is done without GCing everything and you can also safely share data because you have a copy not a ref.
packetlost 6 hours ago [-]
An JavaScripts is? Rust is probably a more performant target regardless
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
Surprisingly yes! JavaScript's allocator and garbage collection system is quite well suited to immutable programming.
Rust is a very poor compile target as the compiler is slow and not commonly available, and the aspects of Rust that make it good for humans to write make it a poor choice for compilers to target. With humans the produced code is verified, but with a compiler the compiler is what is to be verified, so the inflexibility of Rust are largely a hindrance compared to other native compilation targets.
Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago [-]
What lower-level language do you think aside from rust which can be more helpful for the purposes of being a compile target, nim/D both support garbage collection and non garbage collection, so would languages like these be more preferable
I really love gleam and its community and I would really really love if gleam could be more like golang though, which can help it in compiling to machine code
gleam language but with the developer experience of golang (cross portability/small binaries/fast compiled language which is fast to compile) is honestly one of my fever dreams and I would love to know if it can ever be a reality!
lpil 5 hours ago [-]
For that sort of compilation target more flexibility is beneficial, so C, Wasm, LLVM IR, Cranelift IR etc are better than Go, Nim, and D in my opinion.
> cross portability/small binaries/fast compiled language which is fast to compile
You don't need native compilation to build fast single file executables for a program, there's ways one can achieve this with Gleam today. Bundling the BEAM into your Gleam application executable with something like Gleepack is one option, and this will produce smaller executables than Go will by default for many applications.
__MatrixMan__ 6 hours ago [-]
I don't get the impression that javascript is among Gleam's targets because of performance.
- server target: BEAM
- client target: js
Once you've covered those bases, you're kind of done.
If the server needs to do something special in an OS process... might as well let the OS mediate that interaction so that it can be fully generic, rather than trying to bend the language around whatever the unknown action might be.
phplovesong 4 hours ago [-]
For that there is Lisette. Close to gleam, compiles to Go.
phplovesong 4 hours ago [-]
You just described Lisette. Its very close to gleam, and compiles to Go.
fggbbjnvh 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zachrip 9 hours ago [-]
Shout out to Giacomo's twitch streams. He has taught me about some features of Gleam, Rust, and on top of that he's just a very chill person. He takes time away from his focus to answer questions politely and without judgement. There are dozens of programming streams where the streamer forgets to leave their ego at the door and he is not one of them. I highly recommend following it.
giacomocava 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you so much!! Reading this really made my day <3
oDot 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for Squirrel as well!
olexsmir 5 hours ago [-]
massive +1, been watching his streams from time to time, and the man is the definition of a humble and chill person
giacomocava 4 hours ago [-]
Aww thank youuu
speerer 9 hours ago [-]
...And he animates his presentations by hand-drawing each frame transition, which speaks volumes.
[edit - this might have been ambiguous. I meant that it shows he really cares about the fine details.]
The Gleam community is generally very very nice. I maintain about 200k lines of Gleam[0][1], and they have generally accommodated even my stupidest posts on Discord.
The language itself is as welcoming. Even LLMs are less cranky and output nicer code, not having to deal with React.
The title is a bit misleading because one might imply that Gleam no longer compiles to something Erlang can use (not true).
From the article:
> Over the last few months Giacomo Cavalieri has entirely rewritten Gleam's Erlang code generator that has an entirely different design, and most notably, outputs a different format. Previously Gleam generated Erlang source code, now it generates Erlang abstract forms.
lpil 4 hours ago [-]
The title says it no longer compiles to Erlang source. That's true, it now compiles to an IR of the Erlang compiler.
olexsmir 5 hours ago [-]
I love seeing how gleam gets better and better with every release, sadly I dont have any projects where I could use gleam :(
__jonas 8 hours ago [-]
Pretty exciting change that I didn’t see coming —- I wonder if someone will end up implementing an integration with the Whatsapp Erlang debugger
lpil 7 hours ago [-]
The only thing that would be needed for this is for 2 flags to be passed to the Erlang compiler. It would be very trivial!
impoppy 8 hours ago [-]
This raises an obvious question. Why Gleam team weren't doing that in the first place? Obviously they didn't have direct Gleam AST -> Erlang source pipeline, they must have had to build some their own custom Erlang AST representation that they then translated into the source code.
lpil 7 hours ago [-]
We did not (and still don't) have an internal Erlang AST representation in the compiler. Previously we did have a Gleam AST -> printing algebra -> Erlang source pipeline, now we construct a buffer of bytes with the data encoded as Erlang Term Format.
Source was the previous target as at the time Erlang Abstract Terms was not established as the go-to format (Core Erlang was more popular but it did not have a stable API outside of the BEAM, so Gleam's in-Rust compiler could not construct it), and due to the newness of the language having an "escape hatch" where one could abandon Gleam and eject to Erlang was highly valuable. It also meant we could use the Erlang build tool until the Gleam one was ready for use.
vortegne 10 hours ago [-]
Congratulations to the team! I love Gleam and am genuinely having fun every time I write Gleam code.
lexx 9 hours ago [-]
Amazing news! Thank you!
tasuki 2 hours ago [-]
...and many other improvements!
I was surprised to find Matt Mullenweg among the sponsors.
PKop 4 hours ago [-]
> "Transpiler" means a compiler that outputs a human-readable format, such as source code. It's a cool sounding word, but most the time people use it to imply that a given compiler is in some way inferior. This is very silly, as there is nothing about compiling to a human-readable format that makes a compiler easier to implement.
Ok but this footnote comes at the end of a paragraph describing how the previous transpiler implementation was inferior to the new compiler. It's ok to make these distinctions.
karel-3d 7 hours ago [-]
What is Gleam? Where would I want to use it?
All I understand from the frontpage is that it's typesafe. Good I guess? Then there is something about Erlang which I never used.
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
Gleam is a simple functional programming language which leans into static typing , friendly tooling, and a one-way-to-do-it style. You'd want to use it if you enjoy the programming experience it provides.
jeltz 6 hours ago [-]
It is if you want Erlang but typesafe and with a modern syntax. And why would you want Erlang? Erlang was built for making it easy to build fault-tolerant concurrent applications, for example in telecom.
corbinvachal 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
massimodeluisa 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fpemberton 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
11 hours ago [-]
quietFalcon 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Tiberium 10 hours ago [-]
LLM bot.
zachrip 10 hours ago [-]
Did you read the post?
jazzypants 8 hours ago [-]
Let me guess: still no string interpolation in a language ostensibly intended for building user interfaces?
lpil 7 hours ago [-]
Gleam is not ostensibly intended for building user interfaces.
whalesalad 7 hours ago [-]
I still don't know what gleam is for tbh. I like it conceptually. But interop with for instance elixir libraries is not as seamless as you'd like.
__jonas 7 hours ago [-]
I use it mostly for web APIs / services, it's great for that!
Interop is not seamless since Elixir does not have the same static type system, but it is possible and that does help sometimes. When resizing images for example, I fall back to Elixir's bindings to libvips. I've also used Oban from Gleam in the past.
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
It's a general purpose programming language, like OCaml, Python, or Scheme. It's not intended for any specific business domain.
jazzypants 6 hours ago [-]
Then, why is JavaScript a compilation target? If you're not using it on the client-side, then why not stay exclusive to the BEAM?
lpil 6 hours ago [-]
JavaScript is useful in lots of places, and even if one compile target is especially good for in-browser user interfaces that doesn't mean that language is specifically intended for user interface development.
5 hours ago [-]
yladiz 6 hours ago [-]
You can do a lot more with JavaScript than building UIs.
jazzypants 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I know. I use it every day. That doesn't answer my question. Why would I want to write something in Gleam if I want it to run in a JavaScript engine? When would that ever make sense? Could you please just engage with me in good faith?
Multiple compilation targets require increased implementation complexity so you would think they would have a good reason for when you would compile to one target or the other. I couldn't find any information about it on their website, so I was hoping you would actually respond with something helpful rather than... that.
yladiz 6 hours ago [-]
So, you started by making a pointed comment about that the language has no string interpolation when it's ostensibly for building UIs, so I'm not sure why you're surprised you're getting responses like mine or the one from lpil. Gleam is not ostensibly meant for building UIs just because it targets JS, and while you don't get string interpolation in the way you might get in other languages you can go pretty far with the <> syntax.
To answer your question about why you would use Gleam when you're running code in a JS engine, it's the same about any language that compiles down to another, such as Clojure, and you can take your pick of those reasons: preference, syntax, pragmatism, etc. I'm not sure what kind of answer you're looking for beyond that.
jazzypants 6 hours ago [-]
I'm looking for the intention behind it. They chose two compilation targets. That made things harder. They had a reason. That's what I'm asking about.
None of your reasons ("preference, syntax, pragmatism") fully explain the situation without more context. Whose preference? What syntax are users even seeing? Why is it pragmatic?
Compilation targets are generally chosen based on performance characteristics and where the code is actually expected to be run. If you're not expecting the code to run on the client, then there's no reason to use JavaScript. V8 performance is better when single-threaded, but then why use the actor model?
When I go to the ClojureScript website, they have a whole section about why they chose JavaScript as a compilation target[0]. Notably, it mentions the word "client" multiple times.
gleam is very much a language of "no" which if you like that, cool, if not, also cool :)
phcreery 9 hours ago [-]
The misuse of commas is distracting; at least it’s better than reading ai blogs.
gamache 8 hours ago [-]
Your semicolon would be more effective as a comma followed by "but". HTH
dominikh 9 hours ago [-]
Which commas are misplaced?
Joker_vD 8 hours ago [-]
Before the "and", "but", "so", "while", etc. — while most European languages, indeed, (usually) require commas before conjunctions, English is following a somewhat reversed convention. Well, at least the author remembered that they need to omit a comma before "that".
shakna 8 hours ago [-]
Apart from in Australian [0] and Canadian [1] English, where it is generally optional, but used where it can increase clarity or meter.
[0] Australian Government Publishing Service's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers, ISBN: 978 0 7016 3648 7
As a non-native English speaker I'm always so self conscious when using commas, it feels like I'm always using either too many or too few
john_strinlai 7 hours ago [-]
i dont think anyone actually cares unless you are in english class or someone wants to feel smug on the internet (you can ignore the 2nd one completely).
GrantMoyer 7 hours ago [-]
Informally, commas are "misused" regularly even by native writers, and almost no one notices or cares unless the misuse is frequent and egregious.
Formally, most comma use is an issue of style, not grammar, and style guides differ on when they should and shouldn't be used. The main rule that's actually a matter of grammar is this: commas cannot be used to join two "clauses" (phrases which could be independent sentences) without a conjunction.
Joker_vD 6 hours ago [-]
So putting the commas in "I'm eating a hot dog, she's listening to radio, we are having a wonderful time." is grammatically wrong? TIL, I guess.
GrantMoyer 6 hours ago [-]
English has no central authority, so the lines between grammar and style can get fuzzy. Most guides would say you need an "and" after the second comma, but some make an exception if the clauses are "very short and alike in form". See Wikipedia's article Comma splice if you are interested in the pedantics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice
Joker_vD 4 hours ago [-]
You still didn't answer: am I supposed to write "I'm eating a hot dog she's listening to radio" without a comma for that sentence to be grammatical? Or am I supposed to always insert "and" into it?
GrantMoyer 4 hours ago [-]
With or without a comma, without a conjunction like "and" the example is a run on sentence and is ungrammatical. You should join the clauses with a conjunction, and including a comma before the conjunction is a common style.
There's a caveat where some style guides permit using a comma without a conjunction in specific contexts, but most don't.
zulux 7 hours ago [-]
Don't worry about it.
The lack or excess of commas doesn't upset any reasonable person in the slightest.
steele 8 hours ago [-]
You're doing fine. English grammar pedants speak infrequently. Mostly due to the disinterest of the listener.
tenuousemphasis 8 hours ago [-]
As a native English speaker, same.
sarchertech 8 hours ago [-]
You do need a comma before a conjunction if it connects two independent clauses.
Joker_vD 7 hours ago [-]
So it's "You do need a comma before a conjunction, if it connects two independent clauses" then — "you need a comma before a conjunction" and "it connects two independent clauses" are two fully formed simple sentences, each having its own subject and predicate. See what I mean?
And almost nobody writes sentences like "I love her and she loves me back" with a comma before "and".
nwalkr 9 hours ago [-]
idk, i'm not sure about wording.
erlang abstract form still is erlang source, it's ast of erlang source text.
one call to erl_prettypr:format and text source is back.
word 'transpiler' is still there and there is nothing "pejorative" in it, it's transpilers all the way down everywhere.
but talking pejorative, i was surprised.
my opinion of gleam was already pretty low, but i did not expect to see post-1.0 compiler emitting text erlang source.
maybe it's not that good of idea to implement compiler in language completely foreign to target ecosystem.
lpil 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think your "it is source as you can convert it back into source" argument holds water as all the Erlang formats can be decompiled into Erlang source code, including the final bytecode itself.
I think you're overthinking the cost of compiling to source, and also underestimating how common it is.
capitanazo77 5 hours ago [-]
When will they change their image to not look like girl toys?
Imagine a doctor about to do surgery and opening a toy box
atollk 5 hours ago [-]
I have never seen a software developer be insecure about their manhood because of the programming language they use. This is equal parts funny and sad.
hinkley 2 hours ago [-]
I’m old enough to remember VB developers so unfortunately cannot concur.
omnimus 5 hours ago [-]
It's not surgery is it. It's programming language and their maintainers like it.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
I'm struggling to imagine how this even comes up.
ginkogruen 5 hours ago [-]
Imagine your doctor is about to begin surgery and walks in with a camel, a crab and a gopher.
hinkley 2 hours ago [-]
And a weird little guy who looks like an artist’s eraser.
Rendered at 20:58:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.
1: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/erl_parse.html#t:abst...
2: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/qlc.html#q/2
3: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/syntax_tools/merl.html
https://github.com/lfe/lfe/blob/387d0aa1092bdda0ca17481869e8...
https://github.com/lfe/lfe/blob/387d0aa1092bdda0ca17481869e8...
I haven't tried Gleam yet, though. I'm interested in the focus on simplicity but a little wary because I understand they sacrificed niceties to minimize the language footprint, e.g., pattern matching in function heads. I intend to give it a shot the next time I'm greenfielding something.
Edit: pure* functional
Odd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:
Not sure if there is something like that in Erlang (or Gleam for that matter).Also tbh, I don't like reduce either. I agree with that article posted on HN a while back about devs not liking reduce. Just want to insert into my list or whatever.
https://gleam.run/frequently-asked-questions/#How-does-Gleam...
> I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up
And you think that:
> a Rust programmer is more likely to prefer Gleam to Elixir
Are we maybe splitting hairs here?
This is way too strong and narrow statement. Gleam is statically typed garbage collected language, closer to OCaml than Rust. Elixir if you like dynamically typed instead.
The languages that Gleam is most like might be Standard ML, OCaml, Elm, and F#.
That is: they aren't similar languages on a technical level, but if you know Rust, you should be able to make the jump to Gleam pretty quickly.
It can take a moment to understand that things are done quite differently in the two languages due to being so different: https://gleam.run/frequently-asked-questions/#How-does-Gleam...
And guess which languages inspired several things in Rust.
I think by sentiments like this, people mean if you know unions, records, and pattern matching then you'll more easily pick up another language that has unions, records, and pattern matching.
[1] https://gleam.run/cheatsheets/gleam-for-rust-users/
Rust is a very poor compile target as the compiler is slow and not commonly available, and the aspects of Rust that make it good for humans to write make it a poor choice for compilers to target. With humans the produced code is verified, but with a compiler the compiler is what is to be verified, so the inflexibility of Rust are largely a hindrance compared to other native compilation targets.
I really love gleam and its community and I would really really love if gleam could be more like golang though, which can help it in compiling to machine code
gleam language but with the developer experience of golang (cross portability/small binaries/fast compiled language which is fast to compile) is honestly one of my fever dreams and I would love to know if it can ever be a reality!
> cross portability/small binaries/fast compiled language which is fast to compile
You don't need native compilation to build fast single file executables for a program, there's ways one can achieve this with Gleam today. Bundling the BEAM into your Gleam application executable with something like Gleepack is one option, and this will produce smaller executables than Go will by default for many applications.
- server target: BEAM
- client target: js
Once you've covered those bases, you're kind of done.
If the server needs to do something special in an OS process... might as well let the OS mediate that interaction so that it can be fully generic, rather than trying to bend the language around whatever the unknown action might be.
[edit - this might have been ambiguous. I meant that it shows he really cares about the fine details.]
The language itself is as welcoming. Even LLMs are less cranky and output nicer code, not having to deal with React.
[0]: https://blisswriter.app/
[1]: https://nestful.app/
From the article:
> Over the last few months Giacomo Cavalieri has entirely rewritten Gleam's Erlang code generator that has an entirely different design, and most notably, outputs a different format. Previously Gleam generated Erlang source code, now it generates Erlang abstract forms.
Source was the previous target as at the time Erlang Abstract Terms was not established as the go-to format (Core Erlang was more popular but it did not have a stable API outside of the BEAM, so Gleam's in-Rust compiler could not construct it), and due to the newness of the language having an "escape hatch" where one could abandon Gleam and eject to Erlang was highly valuable. It also meant we could use the Erlang build tool until the Gleam one was ready for use.
I was surprised to find Matt Mullenweg among the sponsors.
Ok but this footnote comes at the end of a paragraph describing how the previous transpiler implementation was inferior to the new compiler. It's ok to make these distinctions.
All I understand from the frontpage is that it's typesafe. Good I guess? Then there is something about Erlang which I never used.
Interop is not seamless since Elixir does not have the same static type system, but it is possible and that does help sometimes. When resizing images for example, I fall back to Elixir's bindings to libvips. I've also used Oban from Gleam in the past.
Multiple compilation targets require increased implementation complexity so you would think they would have a good reason for when you would compile to one target or the other. I couldn't find any information about it on their website, so I was hoping you would actually respond with something helpful rather than... that.
To answer your question about why you would use Gleam when you're running code in a JS engine, it's the same about any language that compiles down to another, such as Clojure, and you can take your pick of those reasons: preference, syntax, pragmatism, etc. I'm not sure what kind of answer you're looking for beyond that.
None of your reasons ("preference, syntax, pragmatism") fully explain the situation without more context. Whose preference? What syntax are users even seeing? Why is it pragmatic?
Compilation targets are generally chosen based on performance characteristics and where the code is actually expected to be run. If you're not expecting the code to run on the client, then there's no reason to use JavaScript. V8 performance is better when single-threaded, but then why use the actor model?
When I go to the ClojureScript website, they have a whole section about why they chose JavaScript as a compilation target[0]. Notably, it mentions the word "client" multiple times.
[0] https://clojurescript.org/about/rationale
[0] Australian Government Publishing Service's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers, ISBN: 978 0 7016 3648 7
[1] The Canadian style: a guide to writing and editing https://archive.org/details/canadianstylegui0000unse
Formally, most comma use is an issue of style, not grammar, and style guides differ on when they should and shouldn't be used. The main rule that's actually a matter of grammar is this: commas cannot be used to join two "clauses" (phrases which could be independent sentences) without a conjunction.
There's a caveat where some style guides permit using a comma without a conjunction in specific contexts, but most don't.
The lack or excess of commas doesn't upset any reasonable person in the slightest.
And almost nobody writes sentences like "I love her and she loves me back" with a comma before "and".
but talking pejorative, i was surprised. my opinion of gleam was already pretty low, but i did not expect to see post-1.0 compiler emitting text erlang source. maybe it's not that good of idea to implement compiler in language completely foreign to target ecosystem.
I think you're overthinking the cost of compiling to source, and also underestimating how common it is.
Imagine a doctor about to do surgery and opening a toy box