tesla VS gleam

I haven’t used commanded, exmachina, or ash:

- Tesla has a mode which can be used completely without macros, and I am increasingly encouraging that it be the only way that it is used. So does the author (as of 2020): https://github.com/elixir-tesla/tesla/issues/367#issuecommen...

There is also `req` mentioned in a recent post as an alternative (it looks good, but I am still playing with it to see if it is a suitable replacement for Tesla in all cases).

- Absinthe is something of a compiler itself, because it has to strictly define things the way that is specified in the GraphQL spec. You can now import an SDL file, but you still need to hook resolvers and middleware into it. Honestly, I don’t think that the schema definitions in JS/TS are much better for GraphQL in terms of readability.

Being heavily macro-based means that there are sharp edges that are harder to work around when you want to add your own macros for code reuse purposes. That said, aside from the schema definition, Absinthe is entirely usable without macros. Within the schema definition, Absinthe isn’t making anything up, it’s using the same basic definitions that the GraphQL spec do, adapted for Elixir syntax.

Exmachina didn’t interest me because I don’t think much of factory_bot (which used to be called factory_girl), as I saw it abused far more than used well (IMO, it’s impossible to use correctly). Ash…looks like an interesting experiment, but I don’t know that there’s a lot of pick-up with it compared to Phoenix. And I have yet to find a use for CQRS/ES, so there’s no reason for me to play with commanded. I certainly wouldn’t consider any of these three to be "major" players in Elixir. Tesla and Absinthe? Yes.

tesla

To integrate the API via Elixir let's use the HTTP wrapper Tesla. There are many good options out there, such as the good old Httpoison. However, Tesla has some added benefits. I won't go into details as it's not the purpose of this article, but it's worth checking out.

I haven't had time to really try to write anything in it, but https://gleam.run/ looks really good too. Like Elm for backend + frontend!

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.