elixir_script VS purescript

I agree that there's room for a language that runs on the BEAM and also compiles to JS. Gleam looks great, and it's one of the up and coming languages that I'm rooting for. In addition to having a Javascript compile target, it's statically typed which is a prerequisite for me when it comes to productivity and correctness.

There was actually a developer working on a subset of Elixir that compiles to JS called Elixirscript[1], but development seems to have stalled. Another functional statically typed compile-to-js language which targets the BEAM vm is Purescript through the Purerl project [2].

If you're going to compile to JS though, there's an argument to be made that you might not want to target the BEAM at all. You could potentially run your entire backend on something like Cloudflare Workers, which has over 200 points of presence around the world, so latency is about as low as possible. The other CDNs have their own competing worker runtimes as well (e.g. Cloudfront functions, Netlify functions, etc.). These edge worker runtimes also have the benefit of not charging for each individual region in which you operate. You can also run any language which compiles to WASM like Rust, Assemblyscript, or Grain [3] on these edge runtimes. The only missing piece for me is a distributed database, but it looks like Cloudflare at least is working on that [4].

[1] https://github.com/elixirscript/elixirscript

— Elixirscript is a Elixir to Javascript transpiler with similar goals as our project. The main downside of Elixirscript is the lack of OTP support (Erlang’s main framework for building failsafe applications) — it works on a really small subset of the Elixir language and they need to rewrite the Elixir standard library in Javascript for it to work. In contrast we are OTP compatible — we transpiled the real Erlang standard library from OTP and distributed it open-source: https://github.com/erlscripten/erlps-stdlib ( Erlang Solutions ).

Naturally I’d recommend using a better language such as ReScript or Elm or PureScript or F#‘s Fable + Elmish, but “React” is the king right now and people perceive TypeScript as “less risky” for jobs/hiring, so here we are.

Unless you want to switch to https://www.purescript.org/.

Assuming this is a PS knock, fwiw this went away a good bit ago: https://github.com/purescript/purescript/releases/tag/v0.14.2

PureScript is a Haskell-like language aimed at providing an alternative to TypeScript for statically typed programming in the JavaScript space. I highly recommend taking a look at PureScript for your compile-to-JavaScript needs outside of the use case we'll be talking about in this post.