As Elixir is getting its own type system, should one still pick Gleam over Elixir?
If you already have lots of Elixir in production, or you enjoy Elixir's highly dynamic approach to solving problems and would like to get some additional safety for free then sticking with Elixir is a no-brainer!
If you'd like a simpler language with tighter static analysis guarantees while still being able to dip into the wider ecosystem then you might prefer Gleam.
Ultimately I think the two languages have very different philosophies and idioms, folks will naturally find themselves preferring one or the other ^.^
I understand that, but why then is OTP then limited on Gleam? Is interop to Erlang different than it is in Elixir? Elixir doesn't offer Elixir versions of a *lot* of OTP, but its Erlang interop feels quite natural (though not seamless). Can you just farm out to Erlang in Gleam? Does Gleam's static typing hinder this at all? Of course I can look this up for myself, but figured I'd asked here for the benefit of others since you're the author of Gleam :)
RE named processes, that's coming in the next release, and there's already multiple registry modules implemented in Gleam, including one funded by the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation.
Ya that's what I was asking about, mostly the interop. But I can just look it up :). Thanks, Louis!
I have used gleam and my own FFI, calling erlang from gleam isn't difficult.
I don't particularly want to gatekeep "Rust fans who just want to write lots of Rust" off OTP. Let them have Gleam. Maybe they'll figure out how to lifetime-annotate binaries?
What do you mean by this, I know how lifetimes work in rust, but how would you do it on the binary level ?
Beyond being functional and sharing a runtime I don't think Elixir and Gleam have much in common at all. Our recent developer survey showed that the majority of Gleam programmers were not Elixir users and largely were not attracted to that language.
> Our recent developer survey showed that the majority of Gleam programmers ... largely were not attracted to that language.
I must admit that I find that fairly bizarre. What do you imagine the source of that lack of desire is?
For context, my favorite language is F# and ML-dialects in general, but I also like what I call "principled" dynamically typed languages like Scheme, Racket, Erlang, and Elixir.
Gleam grows the BEAM ecosystem by bringing people in from elsewhere who were not interested in writing Elixir, Erlang, or LFE.
> I must admit that I find that fairly bizarre. What do you imagine the source of that lack of desire is?
They're just very different languages to work with. The programming experience is very different.
The point is that beyond some basic typing things, programs written in Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam will all have the same core structure. Immutable data plus pattern matching plus BEAM processes has a pretty strong affect on any BEAM language.
I dunno... Scala, Clojure, and Groovy users? Small user bases, but the languages are not dead.
I find the opposite more troubling, actually. Take the C# ecosystem and see how there's one de-facto application framework (.NET), one logging lib, one etc... It's usually Microsoft's way or the highway, and 3rd party libraries and frameworks struggle to get any adoption. Consequently, that ecosystem is much smaller, less diverse, and less innovative.