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Introduction to Gleam, a New Functional Programming Language

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2024-09-30 23:00:05

We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.

When my colleague read my Virgil post, he immediately suggested I look at Gleam. It is cool and new — version 1 was released in March this year — and comes out solidly on the functional side of programming life.

Gleam is a type-safe functional programming language for building scalable concurrent systems. It compiles to Erlang and JavaScript, so has straightforward interoperability with other “BEAM” languages such as Erlang and Elixir. (BEAM is the virtual machine that executes user code in the Erlang Runtime System. I believe its short for Bogdan’s Erlang Abstract Machine. Don’t ask.)

Erlang was an early telecoms industry language, very much focusing on concurrency and fault tolerance. Its ways of doing things is still respected and accounts for Elixir’s popularity. In this post, I won’t assume you are familiar with these; and actually, Gleam is particularly friendly, so it doesn’t make too many assumptions either.