Comment by satvikpendem

1 day ago

How does it compare to Gleam? Or rather, why use Elixir over Gleam now? I suppose Phoenix and Live View in particular are big draws to Elixir.

23 comments

satvikpendem

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asib  1 day ago

Do you like Rust or do you like Erlang? Writing Gleam is like writing Rust, writing Elixir is like writing Erlang.

I don't know the current state of Gleam OTP, but last I checked it wasn't great.

If you don't care about either of those things and only about types, use Gleam. But then why not just use Rust?

  • lpil  1 day ago

    Hi, I'm the lead maintainer of Gleam.

    > I don't know the current state of Gleam OTP, but last I checked it wasn't great.

    Gleam uses regular OTP, it doesn't have a distinct OTP framework separate from other BEAM languages.

    • asib  33 minutes ago

      Right, I meant the libraries. I haven't used Gleam for a couple years at least though, so my opinions might be very outdated on this.

  • satvikpendem  1 day ago

    Your last sentence is basically where I'm at, writing my backends in Rust these days. I'm interested in the BEAM promise of letting things crash but not sure how good that is in Gleam due to its OTP still being somewhat immature as the devs are rewriting GenServer as a typed library.

    • lpil  1 day ago

      Hello! I'm the maintainer of Gleam. We are not rewriting OTP, regular OTP is used in Gleam. Most commonly the typed Gleam APIs for OTP are used, but you can use the untyped Erlang APIs if you wish.

      This is the same as in Elixir, where macro-enabled APIs are offered, and they just wrap the regular Erlang APIs.

  • shevy-java  1 day ago

    > writing Elixir is like writing Erlang

    I wrote both Elixir and Erlang code. Erlang is just useless to me as a programming language; it has many great ideas though. I love the idea of being able to think in terms of immortal, re-usable, safe objects (Erlang does not call these objects, but to me this is OOP by Alan Kay's definition. I don't use e. g. the java definition for OOP.)

    Elixir built on that and made Erlang code optional, meaning people could write more pleasent code. And here it succeeded. I am not sure why Elixir succumbed to type madness now, but the comment that "writing Elixir is like writing Erlang", is just simply not true.

    Elixir is significantly better than Erlang with regard to writing code. José Valim got inspiration for Elixir from ruby, to some extent.

    • asib  1 day ago

      You're taking my comment way too literally. I'm basically just making a syntax comparison. Obviously Rust is not at all like Gleam in many ways either. It's just statically typed and has a similar syntax.

    • senderista  1 day ago

      I agree that actor languages are the purest form of OOP as Alan Kay has expressed it. And unlike Smalltalk, Erlang just accepts that some things are naturally functions, not messages.

      2 replies →

flexagoon  12 hours ago

They're different languages with different syntax and different features. Them using tge same VM doesn't really make them competing products, just like Java, Scala, and Clojure all use JVM and yet are all different languages

lawn  1 day ago

Gleam doesn't have macros, which many Elixir libraries (such as Phoenix and Ecto) uses to great effect.

Gleam for example has issues with verbosity of decoding/encoding json whereas in Rust you derive serde and in Elixir it's just a function call away.

Elixir has a more mature ecosystem. While you can for example use Phoenix with Gleam (or some other Gleam framework) the experience just isn't the same.

The big draw with Gleam over Elixir is the typing (where Elixir is now closing the gap) and being able to compile to JavaScript (which is also what Hologram is doing for Elixir).

I prefer Gleam's typing system and the Rust-like syntax, but for now I feel Elixir is the better choice for all my web dev projects.

  • rapnie  1 day ago

    > and being able to compile to JavaScript

    Apparently it is not that difficult to add different compiler backends. There was a presentation [0] recently about adding wasm support as a compiler target. The implementation was quite far along, including support for the wasm component model.

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0--ODjiDk