Comment by photon_garden
12 hours ago
Really enjoyed my experiments with Gleam! Such a lovely, simple language, and it’s clearly been made with great care and attention to detail.
My language of choice is Rust, but I’d go with Gleam in a heartbeat if I:
- Were working on a team with junior engineers
- Building a web app
- On a passion project, or in a business context where the lack of ecosystem etc. wasn’t a concern
For my own projects or with other senior folks, Rust’s complexity is a price you pay once and you reap the rewards forever afterwards. But Gleam’s simplicity would really shine in an organization with a wider range of experience levels.
My biggest complaint besides the obvious ecosystem stuff is that the most popular frontend library leaves something to be desired. It’s SPA-first, which seems like a very strange decision to make in 2025.
Gleam seems like a perfect language to use in a scripting context. Would update a lot of my software if it gained Lua as a transpilation target.
Then one could write performance critical sections in rust and interface with it more easily.
Re front end libraries, the other project I’m working on is an adapter for using InertiaJS from the Gleam Wisp web framework.
It won’t be as elegant as Lustre, but I figure it may be helpful for adoption if React/Vue/Svelte can be used on the front end.
With the server-side routing, Inertia doesn’t feel quite so SPA-first.
> Rust’s complexity is a price you pay once and you reap the rewards forever afterwards
This resonated with me. Will use it in the future when I explain why I use Rust for almost everything.