test VS elm-review

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.)

It uses devbox, Elm 0.19.1, the latest Elm packages (in particular elm/http 2.0.0), elm-review, Caddy, a sprinkle of Dart Sass, and a handful of Bash scripts (one of them being a deployment script). It uses elm test and features tests for key data structures.

A special shout out to Elm review which has inspired how reanalyze reports code that's transitively dead.

The Elm community has an unofficial linter (called elm-review), which can be used to check your code for potential bugs or mistakes, or highlight a better way to write Elm. Unlike elm-format (and more similar to tools like ESLint), elm-review does not come with any default rules to follow:

elm-review: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/jfmengels/elm-review/latest/

Glad to see more posts on Elm out there, it really is a great language and ecosystem! Like any large project, it has some issues, but in my day-to-day writing code I have never had as much fun, or had as much confidence that my code does what it says on the tin, as I have with Elm.

I wanted to give a shout out to one of Jeroen's other projects in the Elm ecosystem, elm-review (https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/jfmengels/elm-review/l...), it is an excellent linter/fixer and allows writing your own rules as well.

For technical debt and other code-base maintenance, I'd suggest using elm-review.