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Comment by fermigier | Hacker News Reader

I had a hunch reading the home page that Gren and Elm were related. This is confirmed by this page:

https://gren-lang.org/book/appendix/faq/#what-are-the-differ...

IMHO it should be more prominent on the hope page or the elevator pitch.

My worry is that by making it very clear that Gren is a fork of Elm, people will assume that what works in Elm also works in Gren. It won't.

Gren isn't compatible, and will never be compatible, with Elm. There is different syntax, API's and runtime characteristics. And it will continue to diverge more and more.

That Gren is a fork, was mostly to save development time. You can expect that much of the compiler and core packages to be rewritten in a few years.

A big difference seems to be that it can run on NodeJS. I was a bit confused that the Hello World example shows a web app, but the compiler itself is being rewritten in Gren?! So, the compiler can spit out an executable or JS code, besides HTML?

It can. If you pass the compiler a output name that has no extension it will produce an executable (js with shebang), and if it has a .js extension it will output a pure js file.

To clear a possible confusion: Elm runs on NodeJS as well. The reason it's not often done is that the (1st/3rd-party) published packages are heavily skewed towards frontend, because Elm is a language primarily focused on frontend and most of the community uses it for that.

Elm is a frontend language. I know there are efforts to make it runnable on node, but to my knowledge, officially the language is only meant for web applications. The website still seems to confirm that. Can you explain a bit better what you mean??

IIRC Lamdera is doing server-side Elm. https://lamdera.com/

The historic elm library for unittests does emit js code meant to run on node.

There is also a cottage industry of applications in elm that don’t target the browser like elm-review, and applications running elm code without using its js output, like elm-test-rs. These are made possible by the relative simplicity of elm’s syntax and semantics, which mean getting a workable ast is easy.

Somewhat off topic but what is the status of Elm these days? Seems like it's been effectively abandoned.

Complete.

(I sure don't miss the constant breakage)

It has been complete for years, despite targetting an api that never ceased to evolve. Its bugs are not fixed, including todos in core libraries.

Practically, it’s abandoned.

Yea, it's abandoned, or development is slow enough to be the same thing.

I use Elm in production and am quite happy with it. Abandoned or not doesn't seem like an issue in practice.

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