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Yes, unfortunately transpilation comes with real downsides. Up until recently, logger events, error messages and stacktraces were displayed in Erlang formatting. It has improved in few cases, but not all, and the line numbers in stacktraces do not align with the source code. And if you want to use a REPL, you must use Erlang/JS ones, etc.

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This is fine in practice as unexpected runtime errors are rare in Gleam. I’ve yet to have any in any and I’ve been using it in production for years.

It would be great if the BEAM had a source map like system so it can have the same high quality runtime errors and debugger support that JS has, but I think that’s unlikely to ever happen.

A REPL would be nice, but there hasn’t been enough demand to motivate any work so far. Language server features are overwhelming the majority of demand when it comes to tooling.

Although if you want to get into Erlang/BEAM and static types are a requirement, I still strongly recommend checking it out. :)

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