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Comment by nequo | Hacker News Reader

Have there been any efforts to fork it?

0.19 also prohibited interaction with non-Elm code which I recall a controversy about. But can't seem to find out if anyone forked 0.18 because of that.

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I don't think it's a fork, but prominent Elm developer/author Richard Feldman has been working with and hyping up Roc: https://www.roc-lang.org

It is my understanding that roc aims to "bring Elm to the backend", so it does not at all look like a substitute for Elm.

Ah my mistake. I wonder if Roc plans to have first-class support/integrations for Elm frontends. Or maybe they’ll stay completely agnostic and just mention Elm in docs and examples?

From what I know from skimming the docs and listening to Richard's podcast, their focus currently is on achieving great compiled performance. Plus, from what I can tell, Richard is still a fan of Elm, so I'd guess he thinks there's space for Roc to contribute to the frontend (that last part is pure speculation though).

Meant to say "... there isn't space ..."

He in fact works on Roc full time now! As does one other Roc contributor whose name escapes me. Exciting times.

Interesting! From a surface language level it feels a lot like F#, but with purity and a managed effects system--which is something that I've kinda wished for/had to build patterns for in F# codebases... I'll have to keep an eye on it, thanks! (reading through the FAQ, there are some interesting design decisions! I appreciate the pragmatic focus. Didn't realize that it was non-curried lang until the FAQ)

Not quite a fork, but Gren is a descendent: https://gren-lang.org/news/220530_first_release/

Gren is a fork. Their first commit is the head of Elm 0.19.1 right?

The faq in the book says this about it:

> Gren started as a fork of Elm. This is mostly considered to be an implementation detail, a way to speed up initial development.

> It's not a goal of Gren to replace, or stay compatible in any way with, Elm.

A little vague but I read it as they're planning on diverging strongly and immediately with a clean break. Which doesn't make it not a fork I guess, but isn't what I normally think of when someone says a project is a fork of another.

Yeah I guess "stay compatible with" and "cover the same use cases" are the connotations for a fork and it really doesn't hit those, fair enough.

Fork means "to the originating project's source code and develop it further in the context and governance of a new project" in my understanding.

So Gren is a fork.

It's such an easy restriction to work around that it just doesn't come up a ton on code that's always been written for 0.19. I imagine it was a monstrous hassle if you depended on it with a big 0.18 codebase, but the new JS interop (ports but more importantly custom elements) are very nice to work with tbh.

There's a third inspired-by-elm language Derw (after Gren and Roc that are mentioned elsefork) but I don't know much about it.

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