Comment by Skinney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Skinney | Hacker News Reader

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No. In fact I added some code that still enforces this with the Git-based package manager.

I know a lot of people got burned by this when Elm added this enforcement, and that seeing it here in Gren can cause a lot of eyerolls.

However.

The greatest feature of the language is the absence of mutation and user-defined exceptions, and managed side-effects. Making the kernel code api accessible to everyone would introduce those things to the language, and my memory from the pre 0.19 days of Elm tells me that this made for a worse experience overall.

One of the problems with this limitation is the lack of bindings to core web api’s. We’re actively working on adding more APIs here. LocalStorage was contributed by an external contributor. Contributors are also working on a HttpServer and a WebSocket API now.

And that’s another «change» worth noting when comparing with Elm. We have scheduled releases (June and December) and are more open to contributions.

As the sibling commenter says, maybe it’s worth reconsidering the approach somewhat?

As in, I do get the reasoning, but there are valid situations where one might need to do this for their own reasons. So maybe there’s some way to make it clear that you shouldn’t be doing this, yet still narrowly allow it. A non-default CLI flag, a scary compilation warning, maybe needs to use some special keyword to use code like that. Like how you need to use ‘unsafe’ in Rust to interact with C code directly.

Otherwise, thank you for working on this! An Elm inspired language that’s open to community development is something the world needed :-D

Yeah. I understand the need for this, but I’m also very hessitant to break guarantees on mutation and other side effects. It’s a tricky problem.

It will be looked at pre 1.0.

> my memory from the pre 0.19 days of Elm tells me that this made for a worse experience overall

My memory tells me that 0.19 literally killed the language.

As is often the case with one's memory, it bears a grain of truth but distorts reality. I've been using Elm 0.19 for side projects and enjoy it.

Why couldn't you make it just a warning, or even require a command-line flag for it? As it is now, even trying to write and test a PR for any such code requires modifying the compiler.

The kernel code API is quite… unfinished. It isn’t documented, it performs no validation and it crashes the compiler when written incorrectly. It really isn’t ready for general use. It’s also expected to break in the next few releases.

I will have to revisit kernel code at some point in the future, probably when looking into WASM (which will break all uses of kernel code), but I have other, more important, features to add first.

Regardless of the details here: Thank you so much for taking the time to come here and explain your decisions, without getting offended or overly defensive.

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