Gleam brings Rust's best ideas to the Erlang VM
Try Gleam
Gleam is a statically typed functional language that compiles to both the BEAM virtual machine and JavaScript. The author, a Rust enthusiast, finds its simple syntax, pipe operator, use pattern, and tail-call optimization make coding genuinely enjoyable. With algebraic data types, immutable variables, and OTP's supervisor-actor model inherited from Erlang, Gleam offers type safety and concurrency that scales—an appealing alternative to Kubernetes for many workflows.
I feel like 80% of the code I write could be copy pasted to Rust (with a tinge of search-and-replace for syntax) and it'd compile.
- brightball
Had a great talk on Gleam at the Carolina Code Conference a couple of years ago by Dillon Mulroy, now with Cloudflare I believe.
https://carolina.codes/speakers/2024/dillon-mulroy
That site is also partially powered by Gleam on the backend.
- subarctic
I have a web app i've been using regularly and develop regularly with gleam on the frontend and backend. I have written very little of the code by hand and use claude to implement everything, open PRs and stuff and it works well. I like that it's typesafe and you can share code between the frontend and backend so easily, and you don't have to get a bunch of config right like you do if you want an all-typescript application. If I was writing it by hand I think I would find there's an annoying amount of boilerplate, but since ai is writing the code for me it's not a big deal.
Overall, I recommend it.
- nchagnet
I wrote this to show my appreciation of this small-ish but beautiful language.
- adamddev1
Gleam is really a delightful language with great ideas, but the lack of currying is a tragedy.
Missing currying feels a little to me like walking in FP land with one leg cut off.
- stiiv
Apart from the language, what's the developer experience like, especially doing full-stack?
F# showed a lot of promise with Fable, but the community never quite got the tooling right, I think for a lack of energy/funding.
- hmokiguess
To your point on "Gleam: the bad" and the ecosystem being small, I would add that this community has a history of activism behaviour. Some like that, I'm out.
- barddoo
I've been keen to try it out for a while, I might do something with it in the near future.
- listedb
Hey! I know this!