nandi.uk
Fork of daniellemaywood.uk/gleam — Wasm codegen work
1# Annoyances
2
3This document contains a list of issues and annoyances that we have writing
4Gleam code today, so that we can devise solutions to them in future.
5
6There are other annoyances that have known solutions that are yet to be
7implemented. These are tracked in the Gleam issue tracker instead.
8
9## Cannot infer what targets a package supports
10
11## Dynamic decoding boilerplate
12
13## JSON (de|en)coding boilerplate
14
15## Bundling compiled JavaScript is non-obvious
16
17## Cannot shift repeated work to compile or initialise time
18
19For example, regex compilation.
20
21## No good story for creating CLI programs
22
23The Erlang virtual machine is not typically installed on a user's computer, and
24bytecode compiled for it is not easy to distribute.
25
26JavaScript runtimes do better, but it is still not as good an experience as
27languages that compile to a single binary, and forcing Gleam programmers to use
28promises and a single thread is not ideal.
29
30## Runtime debugging is basic
31
32Rust's `dbg!` and Elixir's `dbg` were mentioned as good additions.
33
34## Last of if/else makes boolean logic less pretty and more alien
35
36With case:
37
38```gleam
39case str == "+" {
40 True -> Keep(Plus)
41 False ->
42 case all(str, is_ascii_letter) {
43 True -> Keep(Ident(str))
44 False ->
45 case all(str, is_digit) {
46 True -> {
47 let assert Ok(int) = int.parse(str)
48 Keep(Number(int)
49 }
50 False -> Next
51 }
52}
53```
54
55With use:
56
57```gleam
58use <- bool.guard(
59 when: str == "+",
60 return: Keep(Plus),
61)
62use <- bool.guard(
63 when: all(str, is_ascii_letter),
64 return: Keep(Ident(str),
65)
66use <- bool.guard(
67 when: !all(str, is_digit),
68 return: Next,
69)
70let assert Ok(int) = int.parse(str)
71Keep(Number(int))
72```