Dexie.js VS Elm

The word on the street is that https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite is nearly production ready, closing in on the neat 1.0.0 release, with its IDBBatchAtomic engine highly recommended at https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web. You can try out the benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html.

And the other contestant is Dexie, stable https://dexie.org/.

If you were to branch into a new venture today, which one would you pick? And why?

That said, there are some great ways to wrap IndexedDB to make it easier to work with. Since I’m writing this article I’ll toss in my local-first framework Verdant, which can be used without the sync features as a standalone IndexedDB-powered database with a type-safe schema and deployable data migrations. For a lighter-weight approach, maybe check out Dexie.

Using IndexedDB. I have heard its pretty cumbersome to use. There are wrappers like Dexie.js but I am not sure if it works seamlessly with Tauri or if it is the correct thing for my use case.

I use IndexedDB, specifically the idb library (https://github.com/jakearchibald/idb), or Dexie.js (https://dexie.org/) if you are more novice. This works great for large sets of data. For smaller amounts, Chrome Storage API will do.

To make things easier, Dexie.js provides a straightforward and simplified process of creating databases, storing data, updating data and database migrations, etc., over the top of indexedDB.

If you are just looking for a solution for your IndexedDB needs I find Dexie to be one of the best but depending on other needs, the others in the list are also good to consider.

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/