My first experience with Gleam Language

https://pliutau.com/my-first-experience-with-gleam-lang/

by crowdhailer • 2 years ago

59 45 2 years ago

I have been slowly getting acquainted with the language over the last few months and I really love it. It combines great features from multiple languages into a single one that is perfect for building back-end web apps: - It is strongly typed, and has sum types like Rust, with very similar syntax, nice error messages, full type inference and first-party LSP implementation for great IDE tooling; - Unlike Rust, it is a high level language with garbage collection and a sane concurrency mechanism; - It follows the same concurrency paradigm from Erlang, since it is compiled to it and runs in the BEAM. It is quite performant for I/O stuff, apparently in the same ballpark as Go; - It can also be compiled to JS either to run either in the back-end or the front-end side, making it possible to build isomorphic web apps if that's your thing.

brightball• 2 years ago

There was an excellent talk on Gleam at the Carolina Code Conference last weekend. It should be available on YouTube in a week or so.

clarkmcc6• 2 years ago

I’m most excited about the Rust-ish types in a garbage collected language. Aside from the lack of compiling to static binaries, this fills an empty void for me between Go and Rustz

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

I'd love something like Gleam, but it compiles to a single binary and isn't Rust. (I know that that binary would invariably be larger than something Rust might produce due to the need to include things like a GC or BEAM process manager.)

windlep• 2 years ago

The mix package manger for Elixir has a release option which compiles and bundles everything to a single binary. It appears possible to use Gleam libraries/code with mix, which should allow one to compile it all down to a single binary as well (though I haven't attempted this myself).

karmajunkie• 2 years ago

notably though, a release isn’t itself runnable in the same way a go binary artifact is, for example. there are a couple of projects like burrito that create runnable artifacts but in my (limited) experience with them they can be a little finicky.

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

I don't think that's true, or at least, I'd be surprised that I've never heard of it; it's my understanding that due to the multilayered nature of running Elixir, this is actually difficult to do. I know about Burrito, but that's not the same thing.

archargelod• 2 years ago

Check out Nim[0] - it's strongly typed, with good type inference, clean elegant syntax, memory management is automatic (optional gc, default is ARC + small footprint cycle collector), compiles to small single binaries (Hello World is less than 100 kb), has powerful metaprogramming and lsp support.

Nim compiles to C/C++ and then to native code, so performance is on the same level as Rust/C/C++. You can also compile Nim to js/wasm and run the same code in the web.

[0] https://nim-lang.org

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

nim unfortunately took python's significant-indentation idea though

tlavoie2• 2 years ago

How about OCaml? https://ocaml.org/ It's not BEAM-based, though I don't know that any single-file deployment would be either.

pmarreck6• 2 years ago

I’ve definitely been curious about it! Must have a ton of tooling and libraries at this point.

Roc has some great new ideas while also being inspired by the good stuff out there. But it’s also incredibly new.

clarkmcc6• 2 years ago

Gleam seems cool. In the Discord the lead guy bit off someone’s head in chat and I thumbs downed his comment, then he removed my thumbs down and messaged me to say that I was rude. Bit of a turn off tbh…

giraffe_lady5• 2 years ago

What did "someone" say? Key piece of info here.

clarkmcc6• 2 years ago

They were asking Rust questions in one of the channels going back and forth and the mod out of the blue told him to stop asking Rust questions because he doesn’t give Rust advice for free. Which I understand, it just came off in a highly abrasive way so I thumbs-downed it.

lolinder10• 2 years ago

This is just an anecdote and should be taken as such, but I don't know how relevant what was said is—removing an emoji reaction on one of your own posts is a pretty petty abuse of admin privileges regardless of the context.

I'm actually less concerned about the follow up message in private, it's the undoing of expressions of disapproval of the admin's behavior that is most concerning regardless of what was said by the original person. A good admin can cope with disagreement about their moderation practices without having to remove the evidence that someone disagreed.

My first experience with Gleam Language

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