August 27th, 2024

My first experience with Gleam Language

Alex Pliutau shares his positive experience with the Gleam programming language, highlighting its easy installation, challenges with YAML parsing, and appreciation for its concurrency and error handling features, motivating future projects.

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My first experience with Gleam Language

Alex Pliutau shares his initial experience with the Gleam programming language, which he decided to explore after noticing its increasing popularity on social media. He emphasizes that his insights are based on personal experience and not a formal review. Pliutau began by completing the official Gleam Language Tour, which helped him quickly grasp the syntax and basic concepts. He then installed Gleam on macOS with ease and initiated a project to create a daemon application that monitors websites based on a YAML configuration. Throughout the project, he encountered challenges, particularly with YAML parsing, which he found verbose compared to his experience with Go. He noted that while working with SQLite was straightforward, he wished for fewer external dependencies. Pliutau appreciated Gleam's concurrency features, inherited from Erlang, and enjoyed the language's immutability and error handling mechanisms. He also tested his code easily and integrated the Gleam Language Server into his IDE. Overall, he found the experience enjoyable and is eager to continue exploring Gleam for future projects.

- Alex Pliutau shares his personal experience with the Gleam programming language.

- He found the installation process and initial learning curve to be straightforward.

- Pliutau faced challenges with YAML parsing and managing external dependencies.

- He appreciated Gleam's concurrency, immutability, and error handling features.

- The experience has motivated him to pursue more projects using Gleam.

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By @giovannibonetti - 4 months
I have been slowly getting acquainted with the language over the last few months and I really love it. It combines great features from multiple languages into a single one that is perfect for building back-end web apps: - It is strongly typed, and has sum types like Rust, with very similar syntax, nice error messages, full type inference and first-party LSP implementation for great IDE tooling; - Unlike Rust, it is a high level language with garbage collection and a sane concurrency mechanism; - It follows the same concurrency paradigm from Erlang, since it is compiled to it and runs in the BEAM. It is quite performant for I/O stuff, apparently in the same ballpark as Go; - It can also be compiled to JS either to run either in the back-end or the front-end side, making it possible to build isomorphic web apps if that's your thing.
By @clarkmcc - 4 months
Gleam seems cool. In the Discord the lead guy bit off someone’s head in chat and I thumbs downed his comment, then he removed my thumbs down and messaged me to say that I was rude. Bit of a turn off tbh…
By @pmarreck - 4 months
I'd love something like Gleam, but it compiles to a single binary and isn't Rust. (I know that that binary would invariably be larger than something Rust might produce due to the need to include things like a GC or BEAM process manager.)