Gleam v0.33 – Exhaustive Gleam

I used Gleam for a day of Advent of Code. It's a cute little language. It has some Rust-isms, some Elixir-isms... I'd love it if it became more popular.

Recent and related:

Gleam: a type safe language on the Erlang VM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183454 - Nov 2023 (236 comments)

For a bunch of earlier threads see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38184288.

I picked up Gleam for this years advent of code and I'm really impressed. There's some rough edges but so far I've not encountered anything that totally sucked.

It's overall a delightful language. Ergonomic syntax with the perfect balance of functional and imperative constructs.

I would like better parameter destructuring and the use syntax is a little weird / unintuitive. The biggest pain point so far for me though has been case expression if guard constraints. I think this may be an erlang constraint, but not being able to evaluate functions in if guards can produce some clunky code. Or at least takes some imagination to produce not clunky code. There's also some inconsistencies in the standard library that make using some things unintuitive. But on the flip side, the standard library is surprisingly rich for a new language not yet stable.

Plus, the BEAM target is snappy. Overall, what's not to love?