Go Gleam (6)
DRAFT (needs work or removal)
In many ways, Gleam is what Go wanted to be.
Go provides a way to write safe networked programs in a language that’s small and easy to learn and use.
Build simple, secure, scalable systems with Go
Gleam provides a way to write safer highly networked programs in a language that’s smaller and easy to learn and use.
Gleam is a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale!
Gleam eliminates several extra features present in Go while enhancing existing features and adding a few features Go doesn’t have, thus reducing the language along with boilerplate. Gleam is so small I learnt it by accident just browsing interesting articles.
At the same time,
Gleam’s features are designed such that they’re
significantly safer than mainstream languages.
A Gleam program can only crash by using
three explicit keywords:
todo, assert and panic.
Additionally, Gleam systems can easily manage catastrophic issues like servers shutting down, including entire server centres.
By running on the BEAM VM, Gleam has a very powerful concurrency system that can create and manage trees of green threads across instances of the VM over the network, such that a machine going down doesn’t affect service. I imagine it’s a bit like Kubernetes, though the BEAM VM and accompanying OTP library has been used and improved much longer. Very few languages provide such scalability.
Gleam isn’t a perfect fit, of course.
It’s a functional language, with immutable data, so it doesn’t match how most people learn to program. However, Gleam is the easiest functional language to get into. You can learn it in a few hours and be productive in a week or two. For instance, it has only one way to loop, one way to manage conditionals and one way to handle errors.
Gleam also doesn’t compile to standalone binaries, so the ways to distribute a Gleam program is limited. However, it does compile to Javascript with easy interop, so you can easily write user-facing applications with it.
Gleam doesn’t have the ecosystem that Go has, which is to be expected of a new language, but I expect it to catch up soon. Additionally, compiling to Javascript and Erlang/BEAM means that there is a vast ecosystem that can be accessed with little effort. Gleam’s interop is incredibly simple.
I encourage you to have a look at Gleam. The syntax is familiar, there’s no surprise runtime errors, the error messages are incredible and the feedback is incredibly fast.