Building a real-time chat in Gleam – gautier.dev

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2024-09-05 14:00:04

Gleam is a an awesome language that makes you productive in no time. The absence of mutable state requires thinking a bit out of the box, but it brings many benefits. View the result on GitHub.

While I’ve been dreaming about a new programming language that I would never build, a British developer named Louis Pilfold has been hard at work actually creating one: Gleam.

I first heard about it in early 2024, when it was still in beta, thought it looked nice and moved on. In mid-2024, Exploring Gleam, a type-safe language on the BEAM!, made it to the front page of the orange website, and I decided to give it a try. The intentionally small language can be learned in a single afternoon thanks to its short and sweet language tour.

Regarding the young ecosystem, while it may be an issue for corporate projets that depend on the free work of others, it’s not a problem for personal projects: if it doesn’t exist, make it and share it! Gleam comes with a package manager, a formatter and a language server. That’s more than enough to get started; young, but not immature.

What about Erlang? I knew very little about it except that it was created by Ericsson for telecom purposes and had a weird syntax: