Metals VS gleam

Links: - https://dotty.epfl.ch/ - https://scala-native.org/en/stable/ - https://www.scala-js.org/ - https://typelevel.org/ - https://zio.dev/ - https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/pull/3120 - https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/pull/16517 - https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/index.html - https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/ - https://scalameta.org/metals/ - https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatibility-intro.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/04/18/faster-scalajs-development-with-frontend-tooling.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html

You might want to look at Scala, they have proper LSP support with metals which means you can write your code in vscode, neovim, emacs, or even fleet (the new jetbrains text editor).

Please write in the comments if you know of any language servers I should test it with. Currently I tested only metals and rust-analyzer.

If you are using nvim-lspconfig you can pass the settings as a Lua table to the setup function. For example, here are may metals settings:

Bazel support in Metals. I didn't spend all that time figuring out and adjusting Emacs/Spacemacs and making my workflow (almost) mouse-free just to scrap my config and switch to IDEA's rodent infested ways.

There is one small issue involving code completion returning inappropriate completions in some cases; https://github.com/scalameta/metals/pull/4414 will fix it, once it's included in a release. Perhaps that's the PR you saw?

It is, by quite a bit.

While the "Scala IDE" project is dead for all practical purposes, IntelliJ IDEA's Scala plugin is actually pretty amazing. There's also a VisualStudio plugin that does pretty much the same and is advancing by leaps and bounds. There are also interconnecting projects that provide i.e. language server or build server that are reused by other projects. It's pretty modular. Metals (https://scalameta.org/metals/) is amazing.

In general the language has become a wee bit faster to build, there was good progress with build times during the 2.12/2.13 cycles.

With Scala3 the language got a bit simpler; concepts that were implemented explicitly using (hehe) implicits got their own keywords and a lot of the opinionated boilercode that cause a lot of debates is now generated during complication and hidden. A lot of "standardization" has occurred.

IntelliJ has its own BSP. The other one is Metals. You can use it with many IDEs (vim, emacs, vscode, atom,...). Use it with emacs if you're comfortable with it.

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