Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.
So it was dead, it just now has been resurrected (and AFAIK with a whithered community in the meantime).
javascriptland really warps peoples minds on stability and project-liveness
To be fair, Elm hasn't made it to 1.0 (yet). That's where languages should make breaking changes before being stuck with the flaws forever.
I remember when Rich Hickey was asked "what feature of Clojure you regret and would like to remove?", he said: "None. Doing that would break stuff for people".
I think the "Elm is stable not dead" seen from the few people that stuck around with Elm is largely cope for being stuck with an unmaintained language. Languages, like all other pieces of software need maintenance or they degrade in the world moving around it (e.g. there is/was no official aarch64 build of Elm in the period of non-maintenance).
I also would say that Elm is still largely unfit for most realistic production scenarios, unless you have the manpower to build everything from scratch, as interoperability with the outside web world (JS/TS) is an afterthough, and by some parts of the community not desired.
If Elm's definition of stability is keeping bugs and runtime errors for years, then I'm glad I stopped using Elm long ago.
Not only were the issues unaddressed, but for the past years the PR got no human response. For instance this one¹ fixes infinite loops in the core. [¹]: https://github.com/elm/core/pull/1137
The Elm community (or those who remained anyway) has a very cult-like way of spinning the current status quo as being good for you, even if it’s not.
Removing native JavaScript interop in 0.19? They’re just making it more pure! Sorry your project had to become impossible to continue on Elm, but this is the price we pay for a leader with vision.
No appreciable updates or bug fixes for 7 years? That’s just stability! Look how stable and mature it is that it can go 7 years without a release!
If not, the expectations you and many have here seem pretty unreasonable. There's room for projects like Elm. Not every PL has to meet the demands of every single non paying user of the community.
Even if there had just been incremental bug fixes, I suspect between some and most people would have gotten over it, but seven years of silence is a very long time- long enough for an entire generation of new developers to start calling themselves seniors knowing only that Elm has stalled and shouldn't be used, because the controlling developers are unreliable and prone to giving the appearance of abandoning the language.
Obviously not, but for a short while it felt like Elm evangelization was everywhere.
Ironically, the small group pushing it so hard at the company I was with at the time were arguing that it was very stable and production ready, despite being pre-1.0.
That argument switched for the 0.19 release, when it was argued that it was still early and changing a lot.
The argument switched again when they didn't make any progress for 7 years, which was supposed to be a sign that it was highly stable and mature.
> There's room for projects like Elm. Not every PL has to meet the demands of every single non paying user of the community.
Fully agree, but there's also room for opinions of people using the project. When a project encourages adoption and then pulls the rug out from under actual users, it's also okay for those users to be upset.
That's one thing the Elm project disagreed with. They had drama where even contributors were being handed 7-day bans for innocuous things like talking about native modules after the decision had been made to move away from them. Their subreddit was the kind of place ruled with an iron fist where any post that wasn't completely Elm-positive would be disappeared. There wasn't any room for disagreement in the Elm community and it partially collapsed on them when they pushed it too far.
People are welcome to their opinions, but I don't see a rug pull, I see a grad student who created a project that people enjoyed and a few companies offered to fund. Evan clearly wanted to maintain control over direction and stepping away from open source is completely acceptable and not uncommon for the very reasons on display here. People have completely unreasonable expectations from maintainers of free software.
In my eyes, it was probably the right decision technically, but deeply unpopular and probably the wrong decision socially.
Elm served its purpose for me - an example of a small language with great tooling and error messages. And the strictness was helpful in learning to do things the "proper" way in the Elm model, even if I did reach for escape hatches in later projects. E.g. writing a notion-like application in Elm, I had to walk through my data twice - once to render it and another time to collect cache misses. With hyperapp, I broke purity a little and accumulated the information on the side.
It’s a whole different set of values. Good React code in 2026 looks like any compiling Elm code since 2016.
I get that some people like stability, but that is quite different from going without updates for 6+ years.
First, the comparison is perfectly fair. Elm 0.19.1, 6 years ago/0.19.2 today, React 16.1 6 years ago/19.2 today. Literally identical conditions. What is unfair? Which required app developers to do more work? Which saw more security issues among its releases?
Second, not needing updates for 6 years, and having zero security holes in that time, is the definition of stability. This isn’t really a matter of opinion or preference.
I do see the appeal in other frameworks (ecosystem size, easier to find devs), but the appeal of Elm truly is stability. And it really is that much better than nearly everything else that runs in the browser, in that regard.
No framework that allow you to use actual JS (or “transpiles” but gives you the full JS API, like Coffee/TypeScript), will ever offer the level of stability Elm offers (aside from maybe the web standard APIs on which Elm is narrowly built).
Today's Elm toolchain is the Elm toolchain of 6 years ago!
Almost all of it? Meanwhile Elm had extremely painful "Evan knows best" breaking changes that all but killed it and any momentum it once had
I never used elm except for doing a tutorial, but lately I've built a full stack gleam app (using coding agents for the most part, with a lot of control in the beginning on the structure of the code) and have found that process works quite well
However, I feel people often miss the real value of a good DSL: it's not about the syntax, but about providing hardened semantics that can bolster or guarantee desired qualities. Elm, for instance, provides value insofar as it makes producing runtime exceptions significantly more difficult.
Personally, I hope languages like Lean, which provides exceptional support for creating DSLs within the language, renew interest in semantically sound DSLs, especially if we insist on using LLMs.
Byte encoder/decoder in Elm are opaque, so their implementation is hidden. A smart compiler, such as the one I am writing, can take advantage of that with compiler intrinsics that replace the implementation with something that the compiler itself optimizes.