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)