Elm VS yew

Recently a friend recommended me Elm, a pure functional language for developing web applications. I'd like to compare it to JavaScript and show how the functional paradigm can work in practical applications.

If you want to combine functional programming with the web i'd consider Elm which seems to have a fairly decent documentation and a good official guide.

Well, but the website tries to encourage you to use Elm. The guide explicitly asks you to "give Elm a shot and see what you think". So it seems to me that Evan does want Elm to be popular.

Ahem Elm ahem

I really like Elm [0] and write all my side projects in it. There are many reasons I like it, but the one that probably plays best around here is that it feels like a very learn-it-for-life type language. It has a release cadence measured in years (the latest version, 0.19.10, was released in October 2019!), and a community that has adapted to match. Elm doesn't release shiny new features often, or even necessarily ever again, but it has everything I need to make every web game I could possibly think of already so that's a good thing.

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

As for other languages, I wrote one for Elm (https://elm-lang.org/) inspired by ts-rs: https://crates.io/crates/elm_rs

Also check out the follow-up issue!

negative numbers not being allowed in pattern matches ... prevents me from shooting myself in the foot

Pretty much. I keep asking people "Why not Elm?" ( https://elm-lang.org/ ) but no one has a very good answer.

The weird thing to me is that the two main customers or consumers of front-end programming (publishers and users) never see and do not care about the underlying language or implementation! Businesses and other orgs (schools, NGOs, etc.) as well as individuals (FB users, WordPress blogs, etc.) never see under the hood (except when something goes wrong or they deliberately click "View Source", eh?)

Ergo, all this whole Javascript ecosystem is solely for the developers. It's like a giant and largely irrelevant MMORG that we play that produces mostly-working websites and apps almost as a side effect.

"Change my mind?"

In addition to React/Vue, you have the ability to use Rust client-side frameworks such as Yew[0] or seed[1] for a truly full-stack Rust experience. I've been using Tauri + Yew to build an cross-platform app (shameless plug: [2]) and it's been a pleasure. There are some rough edges, but most of those have been due to platform specific issues (notifications, Windows vs Unix paths, etc.) and not Tauri/Yew itself.

[0] https://yew.rs/

I think something like yew(https://yew.rs) is actually viable option for most of the GUI apps you want. It's web, but it's still high perforamance.

Yew.rs

I would disagree, please see https://yew.rs/

Yeah, I'd say js has a decades worth heads start, but wasm seems to be slowly moving along quite fine which would potentially encourage other languages to build their own web frameworks on top of it in the future following Blazor and the early adopters. For example Yew which is a rust based wasm framework is another pretty popular one. I'm sure there's more that will come the moment wasm gets more features implemented into the standard like GC, and web api / dom access.

Client is built in Yew/Tauri

A nice example project I ran in to is https://github.com/a5huynh/spyglass the code is pretty clean and nicely setup. They are using https://yew.rs/ as the front end.

Tauri is also getting a lot of attention and reached 1.0 13 days ago. But you will need to know JS/TS to build something interactif with it (except if you want to combine with yew, but that would be a very cutting-edge experience.)