gleam VS Rustler

Wow. I invite everyone to go actually read the Gleam’s homepage: https://gleam.run/

After reading the discussion here, with our poor community being “blinded by pathetic posturing” and such, I was expecting some kind of political polemic plastered over everything.

Here’s the sum total of everything that could be considered political from the page:

Friendly

As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

Which part of that can you possibly find objectionable? It seems the mere mention of anything political is seen as a transgression somehow. Like, Can’t we just go back to pretending we’re entirely apolitical, while the technologies we build reshape the political landscape of the entire planet?

Gleam GitHub Repository

Official Gleam Documentation

- https://without.boats/blog/revisiting-a-smaller-rust/

It's also niche, but https://gleam.run/ might be a candidate alternate language, depending on your use-case.

Not the other commenter, but my team has been using Elixir in production (soft real-time distributed systems) for several years to great success. The approachable syntax has been great for folks new to the language coming on board and sort of, not realising they’re “doing FP”.

Generally I’d say Elixir’s lack of “hard” static typing is more than made up for what you get from the BEAM VM, OTP, its concurrency model, supervisors etc.

That said if you’re interested in leveraging the platform whilst also programming with types I’d recommend checking out Gleam (https://gleam.run), which I believe uses an HM type system.

The BEAM runtime demonstrates the power of building concurrency and fault tolerance into the core runtime. While other languages can approximate these capabilities through frameworks, the elegance and robustness of having it built into the runtime remains compelling. I believe that’s why Gleam decided to use the BEAM when it was being built.

Gleam

Gleam as it says in their website is a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale!.

One language that really gave me that feeling was Gleam, it managed to wrap everything I liked about languages such as JS, Rust and even Java into one brilliant type-safe package. Not for a long time before I met Gleam had I wanted to try creating so many different things just to get to the bottom of how this language ticked, as it were.

Yep, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find the actual Elixir code be the bottleneck in a real-life application. But if you do encounter that, you can use something like Rustler[0] for the CPU-intensive bottleneck, as Discord did[1] while working on a data structure they needed. Slow DB queries are something else to look out for.

[0] https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

[1] https://github.com/discord/sorted_set_nif

For performance intensive tasks, you could rely on Rust NIFs, there is this great project: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

My last project with Elixir was using Elixir merely as an orchestrator of static binaries (developed in golang) which were talking in JSON via stdin/stdout.

From the moment we discovered Tauri, we really felt like this was the perfect fit. The API is really solid, the configuration files are minimal and easy to understand, and the usage of Rust makes it way easier to add new functionalities and think about interesting ways of interoperating with Elixir via the Rustler library.

Elixir/Rust is the new Python/C++, and Rustler makes the communicating between the 2 languages super easy: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

Rustler is so awesome for this. Write Elixir NIFs in Rust? Yes, please!

But really, I would suggest thinking about what you want to build before "how" or "with which tool" - one of the signs of a person becoming a good engineer is having an array of tools at their disposal and being able to choose a correct tool for the correct task. Rust also excels in integrating with other languages - with JS via WebAssembly (a bit of self-promotion, for example), with Elixir via Rustler, with Python via PyO3 and PyOxidizer, etc. So you absolutely can start writing a frontend app with JS, or a distributed system with Elixir, or a data processing/ML app with Python and use Rust to speed up critical parts of those. Or, in reverse, you can start with Rust & add new capabilities to whatever you're building, that being a frontend, a resilient chat interface, or an ML model.

I created a elixir (wrapper) library to generate password hashes. Other Elixir libraries use a C NIF to generate password hashes. This libary uses a Rust NIF (using Rustler) and the Rust libraries the generate the different hashes. Additionally this library uses RustlerPrecompiled so you don't need to have a Rust compiler installed to use this library. It supports argon2, scrypt, brypt and pbkdf2.

unfortunately as of the time of this writing, rustler does not support generic type intefaces so I guess this is impossible?