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.
Wow I never expected to stumble across a library I created while scrolling hacker news! :)
One interesting aspect of this approach is that if you want Gleam’s type safety guarantees, it requires explicitly decoding dynamic terms into Gleam data structures.
The latest version of Glyn amortises the cost of the decoding by performing it once per cluster node, then using the local typed messaging system to deliver the message to local subscribers.
Looks like it silently discards the message on failure, your users would likely be thankful for error logging otherwise debugging that defect in production will be very challenging.
Indeed Gleam’s typed actors are very powerful! I had to read through the erlang implementation code to fully internalise Subjects and Selectors. Thankfully Gleam makes it pretty easy since the std library package sources are just a go-to-definition away.
You may be confusing the general concept of Publish-Subscribe with PubSubHubbub, now standardized as WebSub, which is a web standard implementing the concept.
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.