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oDot

This is my current mental model for picking a language, considering just the language itself:

- Backends: Gleam or other BEAM

- Web frontend: Gleam

- Mobile apps: Dart + Flutter

- Specialized mobile apps: Swift and Kotlin

- Blazing fast: Zig

- Blazing fast and safest: Rust

- Fast performance and iteration: Go

Would love to hear additions and corrections.

My only problem with this is I'm not a fan of Go's syntax and I wonder what's a good alternative. Heared good things about OCaml but didn't check it out yet.

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OCaml could almost replace all of those. I don’t think there is a BEAM compiler backend yet.

I’m not very experienced with BEAM, but could its features be delivered with a framework on top of a different stack? I know Akka is popular.

The OCaml backend for the BEAM was called Caramel but has been abandoned after his author went on working on hiw own build system, warp.

Build systems come for our best and brightest. :-(

Talk to your friends and family.

Actor model is a small component of the BEAM. Even then, it guarantees yields to the scheduler.

This is practically impossible to retrofit on to an existing language, esp. in the presence of loops.

GC precludes OCaml from replacing a chunk of those.

>>> don’t think there is a BEAM compiler backend yet

I think there's something close - https://caramel.run/manual/

The project has been abandonned : https://github.com/leostera/caramel/discussions/102

I’m super into elixir now and don’t see myself going anywhere else. Is gleam really that good? What are the advantages? Can I use liveview with it?

As far as I know Gleam is the only strongly typed language on BEAM, which is important to me since I don't like dynamically typed languages. But of course Elixir gets optional types now.

There is also:

Purerl - Erlang backend for PureScript, a few folks are using this in production - https://github.com/purerl/purerl

Caramel - Ocaml for Beam, seems dead - https://github.com/leostera/caramel

and more probably dead projects at https://github.com/llaisdy/beam_languages

Is that the only difference?

It can also compile to JavaScript (instead of the BEAM) so you can use the same language for backend and frontend work.

- Backends: Kotlin (on JVM)

- Web frontend: TypeScript (maybe Gleam in the future!?)

- Fast performance and iteration if I want a binary: Kotlin (native compiled)

- Blazingly fast and good for WASM: Rust

- languages that I keep an eye on: Gleam, Zig, Odin

- languages that I will never touch: C, C++

- languages that I think are quaint: OCamel, Lisp, Haskel

- languages that I have used in the past and that are fine: Dart

- languages that I have used in the past and that are ok: Java (if it had nullability, it'd be fine)

I love Kotlin, but don't want to use IntelliJ, and they obviously have strong financial incentives against supporting other IDEs. Has anything changed in this regard?

I appreciate their work on native/wasm, and I think it's great if they could be financially rewarded/sponsored for that work. It's just unfortunate that it has to be in the shape of an IDE dependency.

Nim fits a lot of Go's use cases. It is way more niche though.

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