react-elm-components VS roc

They were considered, I was on the team that considered them. (I work at Culture Amp and at one point was leading the Design System team).

To be clear: embedding Elm in React is easy (we host the main NPM library for doing so: https://github.com/cultureamp/react-elm-components). But embedding React in Elm is harder, as Elm doesn't give any easy "escape hatches" to interact with native JS code.

The main opportunity is to use Web Components. Elm knows how to render any HTML component, including `x-my-custom-button`, which could render using React or something else. We looked into options for this, including prototyping https://www.npmjs.com/package/backstitch as a way to embed our React components as Web Components for consumption in Elm. (No open source packages existed to do this at the time).

We also did quite a deep dive on using Stencil, which has a React-like API, to create web components for both React and Elm - even including publishing new plugins for the ecosystem to generate Elm bindings for your web components. Kevin went into some of the detail for this in the post if you're interested.

Their FAQ is an eminently reasonable breakdown of their choices:

https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md

I don't fully agree with all of the reasoning, but it's a reasonable position to stake.

If you forget what parametrisation and functions are, then Roc's modules look like they actually do that.

Reminds me of: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md#why-doesnt-...

> How would a user interface written in a functional language look?

Maybe you're not aware of Elm?

https://elm-lang.org

Elm is really functional, unlike the likes of React that are just partially, kind of functional.

There's an attempt at bringing Elm to the desktop, the Roc language... here's an UI example written in Roc:

https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/examples/gui/hello...

What are your thoughts on the direct descendant, Roc? [0] I know it's pre v0.1 so maybe you don't have any, but as a fellow Elm lover it seems pretty compelling on the surface albeit less directly frontend-dev focused.

[0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

I might be misunderstanding something, but, for example, look at this "host"/platform: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/examples/cli/tui-platform/host.zig

You are not alone. The other day I was checking out a new programming language and the author rewrote the unsafe rust part to zig: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/FAQ.md#why-does-ro...

Check out Roc[0][1] by Richard Feldman; it's early-stages (perhaps earlier stages than Elm?) but from everything I've seen it looks a bit like a spiritual successor to Elm, though focused more on native applications (but still seems to have its sights set on webassembly support too)

[0] https://www.roc-lang.org

[1] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc