So it's basically a language we desperately want to use, but can't.
The problem isn't that it doesn't work. It's that what you do with ports only work in the context of your application. The JavaScript part has to be defined somewhere else, the Elm code assumes the JavaScript part will be there. You can't redistribute that easily.
How to make it better? that's easy. IT ALREADY EXISTS and is part of Elm. It's just a private API. But it totally does work. It's how the native wrappers are written.
Ports use publisher/subscriber. If I want to, let say, wrap moment.js, which is just a bunch of synchronous functions, how would I do it? Dispatch side effects to "compute dates" and listen to the "response" in my update method? That would be silly.
The port system works beautifully to interface with the outside world. It is very poor to bring the outside world in.
You mean like this: https://github.com/mcapodici/capodicis-notes/blob/master/elm...
That is an example where I connected chrome extension storage functionality using native wrappers.
This is the Elm wrapping for it:
https://github.com/mcapodici/capodicis-notes/blob/master/elm...
For the record, I looked at Elm over 2 years ago and completely dismissed it. I regret that strongly now as I am extreeeeemely happy developing with it and I can build stuff in far shorter timelines with zero runtime errors than I could in react even (which was a high-watermark before Elm for me in that respect)