core VS test

elm is a lovely lang. it would be nice to have modern APIs on it.

here's the project for new eyes:

https://github.com/elm/core

https://elm-lang.org/

In Basics.elm we have:

The package docs for all the functions we learned today

However I notice that the developed of elm/core has died down (last commit was 4 years ago) and I feel that it's fading into obscurity.

https://elmprogramming.com/

There isn't that much good learning material. It is important to get comfortable with the official docs. Especially the standard library that you find here: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/

Looking at the default branch of core, you can already see this in more than just "for the compiler".

For a minimal but useful set of functionality, I would love to see a better set than elm/core. In essence, basic types (Int, Float, String, Bool) and ways to combine these: Tuples, Records, ADT. Since they are also used so frequently, List, Map/Dict, Set and Option/Maybe implementations should also be included. In terms of functions, basic Math and a sensible set of operations for each of the included types. Again, elm/core is a good example.

Once all that handwritten C code was solid, I needed to make sure the C generated from Elm was working properly. I found the source for the core library's unit tests and decided to port them into my project and add some of my own tests. You can run the tests in WebAssembly in your browser too. (Funnily enough, one of the biggest challenges was getting the Elm Test framework itself to run! The framework is more complex than the tests themselves. I still need to come back to the fuzzer tests!)

The de-facto standard for testing an Elm application is elm-test. However, as noted in the README:

Once all that handwritten C code was solid, I needed to make sure the C generated from Elm was working properly. I found the source for the core library's unit tests and decided to port them into my project and add some of my own tests. You can run the tests in WebAssembly in your browser too. (Funnily enough, one of the biggest challenges was getting the Elm Test framework itself to run! The framework is more complex than the tests themselves. I still need to come back to the fuzzer tests!)

Lesson Learned: Elm has built in recursion improvements for a variety of positive reasons, and you should think in recursion to solve looping problems. Use property/fuzz tests and bounds checking with early exit to prevent this from locking up your UI (i.e if > 9000, omg abort). If you’re algorithm is reasonable, but the data set is just gigantic, offload to a server instead for more horsepower. Or Workers if you don’t have server chops, can’t upload the large data, or don’t trust your server devs. (“But Doc, I’m the server dev!” Good joke. Ever̸y̴b̸ody laugh. Roll on s̵͓̆nâ̶̱re drum. Curtains.)