gleam VS otp

Want a friendly language for building safe systems at scale? Gleam is here for you. It features modern and familiar syntax, that's reliable and scalable. Gleam runs on an Erlang virtual machine, and can run plenty of concurrent tasks. It comes with a compiler, build tool, formatter, editor integrations, and package manager all built in so you can get started right away. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major version 🙌.

While I love Clojure, I have to agree about tooling. I recently started using Gleam* and was impressed at how easy it was to get up and running with the CLI tool. I think this is an important part of getting people to adopt a language.

* https://gleam.run/

If you use languages that compile to WASM (such as Gleam https://gleam.run), and can also run Postgres via WASM, then it opens very interesting offline scenarios with codebases which are similar on both the client and the server, for instance.

Recently, Gleam has gained more popularity, and a lot of developers (including me) are learning it. At the time of this writing, it has exceeded 14k stars on GitHub; it grew really fast for the last month.

Oh, strange that github had a date of 2016 on this one: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/issues/2

I was just going by that, though I do remember checking out gleam 5 years ago or so.

Re: macros, I really do think they’re a big deal and all the other newer languages I’ve used, such as Rust have some kind of macros or powerful meta programming features.

For older languages, a few, like Ruby have enough meta programmability to make nice DSLs, but many others don’t. Given the choice, I’d much rather have Elixir/Clojure style macros than other meta-programming facilities I’ve seen so far.

I had been only following this language with some interest, I guess this was born in gitlab not sure if the creator(s) still work there. This is what I'd have wanted golang to be (albeit with GC when you do not have clear lifetimes).

But how would you differentiate yourself from https://gleam.run which can leverage the OTP, I'd be more interested if we can adapt Gleam to graalvm isolates so we can leverage the JVM ecosystem.

I don't think the implementation itself is at fault, but yes, I do think that the design of dialyzer makes it an (at times) faulty type checker. The unfortunate reality of a type checker that fails sometimes is that it makes it mostly useless because you can never trust that it'll do the job.

To be clear, I've had it fail in a function where I've literally specced that very function to return a `binary` but I'm returning an `integer` in one of the cases. This is a very shallow context but it can still fail. Now add more functions, maybe one more `case`.

I think an entire rethink of type checking on the BEAM had to be done and that's why eqWalizer[0] was created and why Elixir is looking to add an actual sound, well-developed type checker. Gleam[1] I would assume is just a Hindley-Milner system so that's completely solid. `purerl`[2] is just PureScript for the BEAM so that's also Hindley-Milner, meaning it's solid. `purerl` has some performance issues caused by it compiling down to closures everywhere but if you can pay that cost it's actually pretty fantastic. With that said my bet for the best statically typed experience right now on the BEAM would be `gleam`.

0 - https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

1 - https://gleam.run

2 - https://github.com/purerl/purerl

They seem to have rewritten/wrapped OTP, but it's not production ready. https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

YMMV, but a BEAM language without OTP severely limits its appeal and usability.

Looks like it is an external library[^1]. Readme states it is experimental and lists some limitations.

[^1]: https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

We have a fully type safe and OTP compatible implementation of actors and supervisors here https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

No primitives as it's not possible to have them when compiling to JavaScript, but we do have them as types and functions in the OTP library https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

On the advice of u/WrongJudgment6 I'm reading the Gleam OTP tests. But I can't compile, and hence can't test, the code. (I'd like to do that so I can tweak the tests to do my own experiments.) Whenever I try I get an error like this:

And docs at https://hexdocs.pm/gleam_otp/

We have a fully type safe and Erlang compatible OTP library! It is used in production today.

https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

It is not a wrapper around gen_server etc, but instead it is a full implementation from the ground up using a very small core. This was done because:

a) Erlang OTP cannot be typed, we need different abstractions are designed with types in mind

b) We want to be confident that our abstractions are powerful enough to build something like OTP, rather than cheating by relying on type casts.

I'm very happy with how Gleam OTP is going, but it is not the focus now that an initial version is out. Tooling and documentation is more important at the moment.