panama-foreign VS Elm

Going to copy my Reddit comment over to HN because I think it's valuable:

---

One of the coolest things that's been worked on (by this same author, no less!) isn't even in the article!

Per has written a pretty-printer for MemorySegments and ByteBuffers that can hex-dump memory or render memory/buffers as their "struct" representations given some MemoryLayout.

You can also customize it with your own printers, it's wicked cool and helps so much to debug buffers when working with them.

https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/695

What do I mean by that? Have a look at this comment for an image of a raw memory structure layout I represented with MemoryLayout, and the pretty-print rendering of it:

https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/695#issuecomm...

[Here's the project github](https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign)

I am not using any special flag (is there one?) but the overhead seems quite high, especially considering the explanation on how these methods are compiled https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/blob/foreign-jextract/doc/panama_ffi.md

https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/blob/foreign-jextract/doc/panama_jextract.md ..look at these examples

I found the full context for the change written up here https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/554

Incentive for JVM devs? We know that C interoperability, malloc, free, structs are already supported on JVM natively since Java 14 with project panama's foreign-memory-api without JNI. I've been using sun.misc.Unsafe since Java8 and also LWJGL's C API.

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/