I liked Elm but I felt the language was a bit limited coming from Haskell, ex no type classes so you have List.map, Signal.map, Set.map, etc
Overall Elm is great in terms of tooling, setup, error messages, performance, js interop though
As an experiment, try using chrome (iOS) or android to load this:
obsidian.systems/reflex-nyhug/
or this:
They're both reflex apps.
GHCJS is bees-knees. But unfortunately, minimizing-code-size/mobile-performance has not been a priority. (It's understandable, as Luite can't do everything himself.) (Aside: the best solution I've seen -- in terms of generated code size -- in GHCJS-land right now is: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/react-flux. Anecdotal, though. YMMV.)
I can't wait for GHCJS to be ready for prime time. I wish all these alt-JS-haskellish language authors (of Purescript, Elm, Roy, etc.) would just work on making GHCJS better.
It's a bummer that Clojure and Scala are much newer than Haskell and yet they both have a mature, production-ready JS compiler. The statically typed ML-family is too small for multiple JS compilers. The entire community needs to pick one and let the others die. Otherwise, we end up with several half-baked solutions and not a single industrial-strength one.
All three of those have very different goals and trade-offs from GHCJS.
I agree that it would be nice to share more work/knowledge though. One of the nice things about AltJS is that several languages can coexist in the same codebase.
And therein lies the problem. In my view, the most important goal is to have at least one really good AltJS-Haskellish language with a fully-featured ecosystem of libraries. (I'm fine if that language is PureScript, btw. PureScript is fantastic.) The problem -- which Clojure and Scala programmers seem to have sorted -- is that our community is too small to support several Haskellish-AltJS compilers. Do we really want several perpetually nascent solutions?
> "One of the nice things about AltJS is that several languages can coexist in the same codebase."
Theoretically, you're right. But how many production code bases are there in AltJS-Haskell (vs. say, Clojurescript)?
Even Jade/HAML/Slim I'm ok with, since they're a terse iteration on HTML rather than a nested monstrosity of code blocks. But I prefer JSX or Handlebars.