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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of Gleam. Out of curiosity, what does it buy you over something like Elixir? Or rather, why do people prefer it over Elixir (or vanilla Erlang or Joxa or LFE)?

ETA: I'm an idiot, I didn't see the "type safe" word on there. That is something worth considering.

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It's type safe, it's important to note that its type system is a Hindley–Milner type system. Same type system family as OCaml, Haskell, Standard ML etc. Its syntax is heavily inspired by Rust. whereas Elixir's syntax is inspired by Ruby and Erlang's inspired by prolog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley–Milner_type_system

This article does the one great thing - the first setence of this announcement post tells you what Gleam actually is. Other projects should take note.

Fly's posts do a great job of this also https://fly.io/blog/skip-the-api/

Edit: lol - I just saw on the homepage that Fly sponsors Gleam.

Also worth remembering that Elixir is now a 'gradually typed system': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38914407

I don't know what José meant by "officially", but as far as I could see it's still not something that can be actually used. I read it'd be available in 1.17.0 which still isn't out.

I found the comms around typing very confusing, it took me an hour to figure out "is there some damn typing in Elixir or is there not??"

Completely agree. I think they were just excited to make progress but it's not out for anyone to use. I was definitely confused by the comms.

1.17 is in release candidate as of last week, but keeping your expectations moderate is definitely still advisable.

The RC for 1.17 is out, and the notes will tell you what type checks are included: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.17.0-r...

It advertises itself as having a "familiar and modern" syntax where Elixir has a more ruby-like one.

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