Elm Compiler Written in Elm • Hacker News Board

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#11

Post by samhh » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

pd-andy wrote: post #9

yladiz wrote: post #7

Serious question: how popular is Elm? I've recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven't seen any job postings for it and so I'm wondering if it's just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

Neither, really. I'd say it has the largest community out of the various compile-to-js statically typed FP langs, at least with an explicit front-end focus. - PureScript has a small but passionate community, one of the biggest players in that community laid off their whole ps team so that doesn't bode well. - ReasonML fractured into ReScript but left half the Reason community behind, it's a confusing space to navigat…

Oh damn, who laid off their PS team? First I've heard of that.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#12

Post by pd-andy » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

Ciantic wrote: post #5

I like it! I gather now you can compile Elm in the browser? It allows many things, similarly as F# with Fable, which allows to compile F# code in browser without a server. Ability to compile code in browser allows to do sandboxes, or tools that otherwise would require a server.

I think the project is a while off of being properly usable. I think it's mostly written with Node in mind, but shouldn't be too difficult to swap out the Fs bits for browser-specific code.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#13

Post by toastal » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #7

Serious question: how popular is Elm? I've recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven't seen any job postings for it and so I'm wondering if it's just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

There was a sizable rift after Elm’s 0.19 version. Removing synchronous FFI, especially to existing browser APIs that haven’t been rewrapped with a new API by the core team caused a lot of individuals and businesses to migrate mainly to PureScript, Reason, and/or Typescript—myself included. Couple with community hierarchy issues, lack of development/roadmap transparency, rotting merge requests to the core libraries (security, bugfix, and performance issues), and community libraries, Git hosting, and identity tied solely to Microsoft’s GitHub accounts, it’s not something I personally could recommend. I do however think it’s a great learning language—especially for first-time functional programming—but I would be very hesitant in your assessment for production if you need to scale to use browser APIs, i18n, l10n, etc. or like/need the ability to fork and contribute to the core.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#14

Post by pd-andy » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

samhh wrote: post #11

pd-andy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither, really. I'd say it has the largest community out of the various compile-to-js statically typed FP langs, at least with an explicit front-end focus. - PureScript has a small but passionate community, one of the biggest players in that community laid off their whole ps team so that doesn't bode well. - ReasonML fractured into ReScript but left half the Reason community behind, it's a confusing space to navigat…

Oh damn, who laid off their PS team? First I've heard of that.

Lumi: https://twitter.com/hdgarrood/status/1412833319348314121

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#15

Post by girishso » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #7

Serious question: how popular is Elm? I've recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven't seen any job postings for it and so I'm wondering if it's just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

I’ve been writing Elm professionally for the past 2.5 years on a large project. The language is a pure joy to use, unparalleled refactoring experience. Yes it’s a small community, but there’s many jobs posted on Elm slack.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#16

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:45 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #7

Serious question: how popular is Elm? I've recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven't seen any job postings for it and so I'm wondering if it's just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

There where an article recently regarding Humios use of Elm: https://www.humio.com/whats-new/blog/why-we-chose-elm-for-hu...

Using job postings isn't really that useful. If they where any indication then the two only language in existence would be Java and C#. That depends on where you live of cause. E.g. there are plenty of Python jobs around where I live, but they aren't frequently posted on the regular job sites. I'd suspect that Elm jobs are posted where Elm developers are to be found.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#17

Post by mjaniczek » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:52 AM UTC

Hello! Author here. Didn't expect to land on HN before the compiler is actually useful - Oto, you'll pay for this! :)

Feel free to ask me anything about the project, although bear with me - I'm learning compilers/... on the go, didn't study them or anything.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#18

Post by mjaniczek » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

de_keyboard wrote: post #2

Very cool! However, could they not compile the Haskell Elm compiler to JS using GHCJS and then write Elm bindings for it?

One thing to note is that writing the compiler in Elm instead of just compiling the Haskell compiler to JS allows us to expose bits of the compiler as an Elm library.

I mean, being able to bootstrap is nice and nerdy and so on, but I believe exposing the parser, optimizer, type inference etc. as standalone functions will be the most impactful aspect of the repo, in terms of enabling better tooling in the Elm ecosystem.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#19

Post by mjaniczek » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:57 AM UTC

Ciantic wrote: post #5

I like it! I gather now you can compile Elm in the browser? It allows many things, similarly as F# with Fable, which allows to compile F# code in browser without a server. Ability to compile code in browser allows to do sandboxes, or tools that otherwise would require a server.

As pd-andy says, it's not finished yet, but yes you're right, that's one of the things it will enable: interpreting Elm code from within Elm - an eval function of sorts.

Re: Elm Compiler Written in Elm

#20

Post by mjaniczek » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 11:11 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #7

Serious question: how popular is Elm? I've recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven't seen any job postings for it and so I'm wondering if it's just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

The #jobs section on the Elm Slack is quite alive.

Can't speak for the community as whole, but there is at least some demand: the company I'm working for is actively hiring Elm devs for at least two teams at this moment :)