fslang-design VS dream-html

The C# compiler got a ton of new smarts around reference type nullability and almost all of the BCL (.NET standard library) got annotated for it. I don't know when F# will finally pick up all the new compile-time smarts for Nullable Reference Types, but it has been proposed and prototyped, at least [1].

[1] https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-10...

Note: For some reason I cant submit the Url with the specific section of the Drawbacks section, but it is here https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-7.0...

Does type provider still only support literal strings for definition, right? Supporting records could make it feasible to create something really good as just a side project. I remember suggestions to allow taking record/types but can't find the gh issue or related. Found the rfc. Seems abandoned. It could be a game changer. :(

But, when I try this example from the RFC, I get an "expected option but here has type voption" error.

Add insert/remove/update functions for collections, also Keys/Values for Map

This is https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-1079-union-properties-visible.md

Someone writes an RFC about the approved-in-principle suggestion with more details and opens a pull request to https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design.

There is some truth to this. Imho the next level of htmx is unlocked when you componentize everything like a React app...but with nested routes corresponding to nested components like a Remix app...and using an HTML generation DSL embedded directly in your language, so HTML becomes a first-class citizen of your language's constructs, rather than a templated afterthought. I have a demo of this: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/tree/todoapp/app

Nowadays I highly recommend HTML embedding libraries directly in the programming language. E.g. ScalaTags https://com-lihaoyi.github.io/scalatags/ or (my own) https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html

Yes, you give up the ability of designers and frontend-only people to easily work with the HTML templates. But in exchange you get quite a lot.

I found your article very informative and it matches up quite a bit with my own thinking about HTML generation. In fact it looks like we independently arrived at pretty much the same conclusions. A lot of the issues you raise are the impetus behind the way I designed my HTML-generation DSL: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html

I am developing an HTML generation library on top of Dream, to have great support in the language including htmx support: https://yawaramin.github.io/dream-html/dream-html/Dream_html/index.html

Look at this code which prints out an HTML tag: https://github.com/yawaramin/dream-html/blob/main/lib/dream_...

Initially you might think generating HTML tags from data structures in code should be a simple matter. But there are complexities--some tags are defined as having no child tags, others do. Some tags are purely character data (unstructured text), not structured data. Some are just comments. We need a way to compose multiple tags together into a single 'virtual' tag for flexible HTML generation. All these conditions can be pretty hard to keep track of--unless your compiler does exhaustiveness checking. Then the compiler will tell you if you missed any cases.

In the example above I didn't make any manual effort to cover all the cases, I simple listed out the cases I wanted to handle in order. The compiler made sure that I didn't miss any.