8 ms·

Road to Elm 1.0

350 points by wolfadex 3mo ago

podnami 3mo ago
What is the point of actively choosing a web framework in the age of LLMs?
- haute_cuisine 3mo ago
  The point is the same as in pre-LLM.
- mhitza 3mo ago
  Stronger foundation (as to mean better tested), less accidental complexity of reinventing everything, transferability of knowledge, easier onboarding and review of changes. Your argument is a mirror of the snark question "why don't LLMs write in assembly?" for those not looking at the output at all.
- the_gipsy 3mo ago
  I haven't tried it, but Elm might be a really good fit for LLMs, because it forbids taking shortcuts.
  - maicben 3mo ago
    It works really great with LLMs, it introduces less bugs compared with other languages
- bbg2401 3mo ago
  Professional diligence, perhaps? A desire to not be blindly led into the kind of narrow, often first-party stack which is so often proposed by Claude Code? With all due respect, not everyone is afflicted with the lack of care sufficient to allow them to launch vibe coded apps as low quality as https://podnami.com https://podnami.com. Considered technology choices are one such aspect of the practice of caring about what you're building.
- pohl 3mo ago
  If anything, LLMs make it easier to choose from a broad set of options. The tradeoffs are the same as pre-LLM days, but the learning curve is more favorable.
- solumunus 3mo ago
  Statically typed languages with compiler hints are the absolute best languages for LLM's to work with. Successful compilation is incredible feedback, and it basically just means that there is a higher chance that the feature is in a complete and working state at the end of each agent iteration.
- akst 3mo ago
  Sorry buddy this is hacker news, you probably meant to enter your prompt here --> claude.ai
- mmmmbbbhb 3mo ago
  I am also confused by this, and not just for web, but any dev technology. I personally couldn't care less what the llm is writing in.
OhSoHumble 3mo ago
Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.
- ale 3mo ago
  I know right. I’m glad DSLs have fallen out of fashion. Just use the platform.
  - chipdale 3mo ago
    I can understand why developers might not care for DSLs, especially when they force a choice between entirely different toolsets and toolchains. However, I feel people often miss the real value of a good DSL: it's not about the syntax, but about providing hardened semantics that can bolster or guarantee desired qualities. Elm, for instance, provides value insofar as it makes producing runtime exceptions significantly more difficult. Personally, I hope languages like Lean, which provides exceptional support for creating DSLs within the language, renew interest in semantically sound DSLs, especially if we insist on using LLMs.
    - lioeters 3mo ago
      I recently learned about that too, how Lean provides ways to create new language syntax and DSLs, which is (on the surface) similar to Lisps like Racket. It's like operator overloading but way more flexible and general purpose. I'm wary of such language features, convenient for specific purposes (like working with vectors or matrices) but I'm afraid it's too powerful for normal usage, if everyone starts building their own DSLs and syntaxes, it would likely make the typical codebase difficult to read and understand. For example, the C++ template metaprogramming madness, it can be used responsibly but in my opinion it was detrimental to the language ecosystem.
    - rupertlssmith 3mo ago
      And then there are sealed DSLs... Byte encoder/decoder in Elm are opaque, so their implementation is hidden. A smart compiler, such as the one I am writing, can take advantage of that with compiler intrinsics that replace the implementation with something that the compiler itself optimizes.
whichdan 3mo ago
There's a lot to love about Elm, and I've written quite a bit of production code with it starting around 0.18.0. But in 2026 I'm not sure why a company would newly choose a language that hasn't otherwise been updated in nearly 7 years.
- auslegung 3mo ago
  Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.
  - Munksgaard 3mo ago
    Does it though? They are many longstanding bugs reported in their compiler repository, and this release doesn't seem to address any of them.
    - auslegung 3mo ago
      Longstanding issues that prevent usage? Not for me and the projects I’ve been apart of. No doubt there are plenty of reported issues, and no doubt they truly negatively impact some users, but I would still much rather choose the usability and stability of Elm 0.19.1-2 than anything in the typescript ecosystem today
      - sheept 3mo ago
        When I worked on an Elm app in 2020, my users reported compatibility issues with various browser extensions (e.g. Grammarly, 1Password). I personally would prioritize making my apps usable for my users over making the DX usable for myself, so I stopped using Elm for future projects.
        1-more 3mo ago
        Oh yeah those are a bear: grammarly, 1password, and darkreader were the big ones, but translation was too. Elm assumes it's the only thing modifying the DOM underneath its root element; the extensions assume the DOM is free to be manipulated. NRI did a writeup on how they fixed it. https://blog.noredink.com/post/800011916366020608/adopting-elm-safe-virtual-dom https://blog.noredink.com/post/800011916366020608/adopting-e... The TLDR is to use https://github.com/lydell/elm-safe-virtual-dom/ https://github.com/lydell/elm-safe-virtual-dom/
dzonga 3mo ago
used elm between 2016-17. it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm. sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.
- sesm 3mo ago
  What's the Elm definition of simplicity? Genuinely asking, because the concept of simplicity is very vague and overloaded in programming.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - xn 3mo ago
    The Elm Architecture[1] makes it easy to reason about code. You render the current state. You create a new state by applying a message to the current state. 1. https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/ https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/
  - threethirtytwo 3mo ago
    You really need to use it to see the light. It's like reading about programming and actually programming. You don't understand programming until you actually program. You won't understand why elm is simple until you actually use elm to the point of internal understanding. I think doing this is much harder nowadays given that most people would likely use an LLM to do most of the coding.
    - dzonga 3mo ago
      said it better than me.
asgr 3mo ago
love it see it :)
surprisetalk 3mo ago
I wrote a thing in 2023 about why I'm still using Elm: https://taylor.town/elm-2023 https://taylor.town/elm-2023 It's 2026, and I'm still using Elm for all the same reasons :) As an added bonus, Claude seems to play very very nicely with Elm: https://taylor.town/diggit-000 https://taylor.town/diggit-000
- tensegrist 3mo ago
  the list numbering in that first link is a bit surprising
- metaketa 3mo ago
  This. Generating a frontend with guarantees can almost not be done with any other language. If you use the graphql module with code generation it's an absolute game changer. Every time I have Claude generate a moderately complex frontend in react I regret it sooner or later due to state issues and inconsistent behaviour. Not with elm. Everything that makes it difficult makes it perfect for ai.
pyrale 3mo ago
> ... and others are more visible features like equatable and hashable types. I love Elm, and I love the community, but I feel a little gaslit here.
- 1-more 3mo ago
  say more! Is it that it has typeclasses but they're closed?
  - pyrale 3mo ago
    It is that even without an open typeclass system, these specific typeclasses have been a common request for a long while. I have worked at a few elm places, there is always a dict-for-everything dependency or local implementation.
    - 1-more 3mo ago
      Haha we may have worked together. Equatable has been a theoretically huge, actually OK hole in my opinion because it _can_ lead to runtime crashes but never has in any code I've written (\_ -> () == \_ -> () is a runtime crash). So I'm glad to see something more robust than "just don't do that." And "hashable" as the real thing you need to implement Set/Dict is a good idea imo. I'm sympathetic to keeping "comparable" closed and even smaller than it is for the reasons in this discussion [0]. In my perfect world, String would not be comparable as-is because string comparison should be locale dependent. Right now string comparison just ends up using JS's < operator which compares as a list of code units. So I'd like to be able to have a Set of Strings or a Dict with String keys without having the footgun of being able to think that I've alphabetized a list when all I've done is annoy a user by putting Área after Zapato and not between Azul and Barcelona. But I agree with you that the current solutions for Set/Dict all have one problem or another: You can use elm-sorter-experiment [1] but then you are writing a sort function and passing it around and maybe you don't want the overhead of that. You can switch to the Lamdera compiler and use containers [2] but then it's a different compiler and a you need to tweak your options slightly to compile an Elm project as an Elm project in it and it could get out of sync with the Elm compiler (extremely unlikely though). You can use any of the list/dict implementations that are really just lists with O(n) everything under the hood. So maybe this hashable type is going to make things better, idk. [0] https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/774#issuecomment-347267276 https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/774#issuecomment-3472... [1] https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-sorter-experiment https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-sorter-experiment [2] https://github.com/lamdera/containers/tree/main https://github.com/lamdera/containers/tree/main
auslegung 3mo ago
About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than most, it’s stable, it has an opinionated architecture built into the language which causes most code bases to be very similar to one another
- katemaster009 3mo ago
  Fair point. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I would still hesitate if the ecosystem isn't moving forward.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  On that note, because of AI I've been more into music, bought a midi keyboard, got real DAW software setup. I've also finally built more and more with Rust, and have been reading more Rust docs. LLMs should never be an excuse not to learn the things you're using it for, those are the bad engineers. An LLM affords me the time to research and learn what it gave me so I can maintain it. It's easier to prompt about the problem if you understand it.
  - yonaguska 3mo ago
    If you have a blog or something anywhere, I'm very interested in your journey.
    - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
      I do though I havent been blogging as much, its a blessing and a curse to have a SSG based blog. I would love to have an SSG engine that I can use remotely from anywhere, currently using Publii. https://giancarlostoro.com https://giancarlostoro.com
  - eddd-ddde 3mo ago
bingemaker 3mo ago
I remember using Elm in one of my gigs. After I left, the client hated me. Not to forget all the drama that it had before Covid. I really want this language to succeed, but its bdfl is trying hard....
akst 3mo ago
Wish them all the best, I really respected the efforts made to normify some of ideas with unapologetic mathematic names like monads and such But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want to make a purely functional language locked down, you really should be upfront that they don't have time to make sure basic parts of the web ecosystem are arbitrarily locked off like i18n until they decide users of their langauge are permitted to use it after ruling out any suggestion it doesn't undermine the purity they were going for. https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264 https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264 Gonna be honest, really got the impression the maintainer here couldn't be stuffed looking to it, and wasn't personally impacted and largely didn't give a shit. Proceeds to run off some bullshit to dismiss the issue entirely about it being too risky (he had better things to do, and anyone he can delegate this too does too), the poster offers to do the work write a report, etc, etc. Then he's ghosted and for some reason the thread is shut after 10 days lol??? I guess giving him the dignity of a reply is out of the core teams hands because of how they arbitrarily configured their discourse. Don't blame that dude for leaving Elm, glad I never made the mistake of wasting my time being dependent on its infantilizating runtime. Look if you want to avoid being too coupled to the runtime your language exists in, sounds like a cool experiment, but maybe don't drag everyone along with you until you figure out the basic issues. All that is 6 years ago hopefully they're more self aware.
- cmoski 3mo ago
  The automatic closing of threads is so hostile to the community.
- jerf 3mo ago
  I see all these people complaining about Elm limiting privileges to certain Github projects. A sensible complaint. But why hasn't anyone simply forked Elm, made the small tweak to make the check function return true or whatever, and offer that as a download/patch to the community? I understand that defaults matter and that can have a large impact on the flow of libraries and code and stuff... my point is more, if you've got production code bases on this language, or at least, did 6 years ago, why so helpless? Nothing makes the point that an open source project can't dictate to its customers like the customers taking the "open source" part seriously. I don't actually expect that to "work". What I expect to happen is that in the second-order effects that it would resolve this matter one way or the other once and for all. Either the core language realizes they need to accept the change, or the community works around the blocker, or the core language goes closed source and removes all doubt and people can move on, including their production services.
lambdas 3mo ago
Did the restrictions on JavaScript get resolved? IIRC, they made it so you had to use their “Ports” mechanism to interface with JavaScript, and you couldn’t write your own wrappers. There was some drama when someone forked it so you could write your own JavaScript wrappers/FFI too?
- miniBill 3mo ago
  FFI is still mostly done through ports (or web components, for the view part). This is an intentional choice and likely to stay until 1.0 and beyond
  - 1-more 3mo ago
    You can also do lunatic things like overload the `Object` prototype and get synchronous FFI by encoding then decoding an object. I do this at work to get locale-aware sorting. I know you know this, but it'll be news to others in the thread.
    - lolc 3mo ago
      Haha, yeah I didn't realize there would be a monkey patch route to FFI in Elm. Can't control the runtime. Is there a good read up on this technique?
      - 1-more 3mo ago
        Slightly important point: it's still safe FFI! Everything that crosses the JS/Elm boundary has to be encoded/decoded from serialized JS Objects. So it's hacky BUT it's not actually unsafe, which is kind of funny. I have an example where I use it to effect locale-aware sort. This repo is a benchmark test of that: https://github.com/perkee/elm-js-sort-ffi-speed-test/tree/main https://github.com/perkee/elm-js-sort-ffi-speed-test/tree/ma...
        lolc 3mo ago
        Great hack, thanks! And yea I was missing some native string api when I abandoned Elm at 0.19.
willdr 3mo ago
Did they walk back that thing where certain language features could only be used by the Elm team? That seemed like a language-killer to me.
- Munksgaard 3mo ago
  Nope.
- jacobjuul 3mo ago
  what?
  - sheept 3mo ago
    In Elm 0.19, they removed the ability for third party packages to provide native bindings for JavaScript APIs that the language or its official packages didn't yet support.[0] The only alternative proposed by Evan is to use ports, which are about as ergonomic as calling a function in a web worker. [0]: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826 https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826
    - 1-more 3mo ago
      there is also web components (best way to do a "copy this to clipboard" button in my experience) and secret back door synchronous FFI through overloading the Object prototype. In all cases the communication is gated through decoders/encoders that can fail; you can only pass serialized data across the boundary from JS to Elm.
  - berns 3mo ago
    The compiler has hard coded domains that control who can use certain features. For example, custom operators aren’t allowed, but Evan is able to use them.
    - discardable_dan 3mo ago
      Why.... ?
imbnwa 3mo ago
So many casualties in that period of groping around in functional programming concepts for the frontend from, like, 2014 - 2020 or so. But a lot of good things endured from that at least.
desireco42 3mo ago
I hope to see progress in the future. I loved Elm and it made me a better programmer. Things changed a lot since then, but beauty of Elm is not matched by any language. Also, if you ever had to refactor anything, there is no language in the world that makes it as easy to change things. Hope to see more releases in the future.
- mrkeen 3mo ago
  You should try more languages
  - desireco42 3mo ago
    I didn't downvote you, but what you have in mind? ROC maybe? I really have yet to experience joy as I did while writing Elm.
_joel 3mo ago
Is it me, the code examples look awful to read?
- 1-more 3mo ago
  it's an ML family language. If you're not used to them they can be a trip.
chuckadams 3mo ago
I'm interested less in getting to Elm 1.0 than getting past Elm 0.19, which is the version that locked out all native modules that weren't officially blessed by Elm's author. Far as I can tell, that pretty well marked the end of Elm.
jgwil2 3mo ago
On the subject of functional languages with JS as a compilation target, is anyone still using PureScript?
- ff_ 3mo ago
  There are a few of us still at it :) Though with the advent of LLMs it became very easy to spin up alternate backends for it, so it's very much alive outside of JS as well.
Aurornis 3mo ago
We had some big Elm proponents who were trying hard to convince the company to use Elm, including doing proof of concept buildouts in Elm. Then the 0.18 to 0.19 Elm drama happened: The core team restricted the ability for users to do any native JavaScript interop, which broke every Elm app that needed any functionality that wasn’t in the core library. It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that they had invested in a language that now pulled the rug out from under them, and those who were true believers who told us that they trusted the Elm team’s decisions and we all needed to chill out and wait for them to address our needs, which they thought would happen soon. That was 7 years ago. There were some attempts to spin the lack of updates as “Look how mature and stable it is!” but you don’t have to look very deep to see that they just stopped working on it. Last time I went back to look at it there were several Elm forks, some maintained by former members of the Elm core team that were more active but never caught on. With the way the core team broke important functionality, ignored the user base, and then abandoned the project for years there is no way I would ever allow this near a production website. I know that will earn me some downvotes from the die-hard Elm fans, but I think it’s important context for anyone who finds themself in a situation where Elm is being proposed for an internal project. It was always interesting as an experimental niche framework, but not as something I’d ever want near a product that I had to maintain. Especially not something that had to survive across developer turnover when your company’s main Elm proponent left and the language was abandoned for years.
- networked 3mo ago
  > It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that they had invested in a language that now pulled the rug out from under them, and those who were true believers who told us that they trusted the Elm team’s decisions and we all needed to chill out and wait for them to address our needs, which they thought would happen soon. This sounds like evaporative cooling. https://lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-co...
- gowld 3mo ago
  It's amazing that business would tolerate paying staff to build products on one person's prototype hobby language.
bbkane 3mo ago
I think of Elm more as an incredibly influential research language these days. It's very focused, there's no public roadmap or official support and the leadership (which is far as I can tell is just Evan) is uninterested in most (any?) community building or core team building. But MAN is it nice to work in. This has resulted in several forks/spin-offs. At the recent Gleam conference, Louis Pilfold joked that every Elm user maintains their own compiler :). There are at least 6 of them (two more got announced in the last month, even as the community keeps shrinking). So I'm glad Evan is now working towards 1.0. Maybe folks can call Elm "finished" and one of the successors can do the hard work of unifying some of the forks and growing the community. Personally, the next time I'm looking for an Elm-like thing, I'm going to check out Gleam + Lustre. Seems to have a nice mix of maintainers that care about community and design. And it works on frontend + backend!
- brokencode 3mo ago
  Yeah Elm has had a very strange arc, but I think calling it a research language is right. There was a period where it was heavily evangelized. Many blog posts were written and talks given, and there was a lot of enthusiasm and adoption. Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled. Which of course he had a right to do since it’s his project, but I think he should have set expectations better from the beginning. The heavy evangelism helped spread the ideas, but also set up developers to feel blindsided and abandoned.
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    > Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled. There was more to the story than that. They made some major breaking changes in v0.19 that broke a lot of apps and left no path for them to continue with Elm, then dug their heels in when the community protested. If you had an app at your company that used the features they decided not to allow any more, you either had to start deciding which fork to follow or start planning to rewrite your app in something else. That evangelism turned into an uncomfortable gaslighting where half of the community was trying to tell you that this change was what was best for the language and that you didn’t really need that feature anyway. There were several forks but I don’t know if any got traction. It felt like an already small community was fracturing into even smaller communities right after alienating a lot of people.
k_bx 3mo ago
We're now migrating to React, but have some very large Elm projects still in prod. The biggest thing for me from practical perspective was to "freeze" some pieces of DOM to be guaranteed to not change/re-created, so that it plays well with some external JS libraries expecting some nodes to not change and stay vanilla. Another is ability to extend Elm's debugger to filter out big noisy data to keep it usable for our project. Third is when your data is too big -- it just sometimes fails with "recursion limit" that's hard to debug due to the nature of the langauge. Otherwise – it's a very beautiful little language that still feels quite modern and easy to work with IMO.
novoreorx 3mo ago
It's been some years since I last heard about Elm, but I still rememeber how it blew me away when I first saw it
rupertlssmith 3mo ago
Worth noting there are some Elm to native code compiler projects now.
tasuki 3mo ago
I almost fell off my chair! Elm is easily my favourite language, and I didn't think it'd ever get another update. Thanks Evan!
dzogchen 3mo ago
Looks like for the first time in 7 years https://iselmdead.info/ https://iselmdead.info/ is accurate.
wxw 3mo ago
Back in my undergrad, I took a Functional Programming class taught in Elm. It was primarily about functional data structures, but we also got to build a web app using Elm towards the end. At the time, I didn't think much of it -- I was probably busy learning React and JavaScript and yada yada for employment purposes. Now, having spent some time in industry and having used some gargantuan web frameworks, I find myself missing Elm. MVC in Elm is wonderfully straight-forward and easy to reason about. Congrats on the road to 1.0! Glad to see Elm still active all these years later.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
adamwk 3mo ago
I can’t think of a worse announcement for your road to 1.0. Who cares? Without localization or accessibility support, it doesn’t make sense to call your UI framework production ready with a 1.0 version. I think limiting what third-party contributors can bridge from browser APIs killed Elm’s momentum for anything but toy projects. It now seems more like a sandbox for Evan to play around with compiler ideas than something meant for production use.
- crote 3mo ago
  On the one hand, it's good to see Evan's doing fine. He has some pretty good ideas about language development, and Elm has inspired quite a bunch of very interesting projects. On the other hand, seven hears of absolutely nothing, then a small compiler performance bump, and calling it the "road to 1.0"? No offense, but why bother? She's dead, we've grieved, and we've long since moved on. Until there's something genuinely mindblowing to release, I don't think many people are going to care.
- shamsartem 3mo ago
  I don't think what you say is accurate. I maintain an Elm app and it is fully localized and I think it has a pretty good accessibility Localization is done using one big record for each language, that I just pass into each part of the aplication that uses strings. It's very convenient cause I can use simple functions in the record where they make sense for plurals and special cases in different langauges Accessiblity is achieved with a combination of good html, ports and in some complicated cases (autocomplete-typeahead) - web components
- kubb 3mo ago
  I say let him cook. The real ones will know when it's good and ready, and hype driven folks can't be saved anyway.
song_synth 3mo ago
Any insight on comparing Elm to Yew? I once wrote a frontend webapp with Elm. And with backend server in Clojure, it made as much sense as Elm five years ago, right? :) For the past two years I've instead used Yew, a rust crate for building UIs. It can look like react or like Elm, it's up to you for how you yews it ;0) My latest app uses The Elm Architecture in Yew. It has been fantastic. I think the biggest benefit Elm has over Yew is its access to the node js ecosystem through Port. You can interface with any npm package if you (or your AI) can write a port for it. So far my best integration with yew dev has been using inline script tags (eek!) where I have to inject some external JS.
- 1024bits 3mo ago
  I don't know about Yew but I've been using Iced 0.14 which is also a Rust crate inspired by the Elm architecture. It seems like Yew is specifically geared towards web applications, which I suppose is in some ways closer to the original Elm project. What is your app? Is it intended for personal use, or commercial?
  - song_synth 3mo ago
    Iced looks nice! It would be super sweet to have a desktop + web cli with a mostly-shared rust codebase. You are definitely welcome to use my app, it is a music generation and education website! Monic Theory can be found here :) https://monictheory.com https://monictheory.com
    - 1024bits 3mo ago
      Nice! I'm quite the beginner when it comes to music production and theory (took me a while to even figure out "Audition" means "Listen"), so I couldn't make full use of this site, but I like ideas presented in your about section. The website is quite functional, which is nice to see from a Rust base. I'm interested in looking at more commercial products made in Rust, they tend to be far more polished than what I can stumble upon in Github (and are thus a nice showcase of what a bit of polish can do for these frameworks).
phpisatrash 3mo ago
[flagged]
otter-in-a-suit 3mo ago
I had dinner with Evan at Scala Days last year and had no idea who he was until he casually mentioned Elm. He is delightful and had some great insights on the philosophy behind Elm and on programming languages in general to share. I have little personal opinion on the state of Elm in prod (the little front end I do is as boring as it gets), but I’m glad to hear the language is still active.
threethirtytwo 3mo ago
I thought elm was dead.
alphanumeric0 3mo ago
I worked on an Elm project professionally for a few years, and I just finished upgrading an old React app to version 19 on my own, which took a greater part of a year. I can appreciate even more now why Elm is so opinionated. As much as Elm is a unique technical, research language, it is a huge cultural change, and I think that is why so many people left. Allowing libraries to be thin wrapper over ports is one example that goes completely against the Elm philosophy. I'm happy to see Elm is still around, and I hope one day people will see more value in it.
- zoul 3mo ago
  For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.
hoppp 3mo ago
Happy to see elm is still under development, I thought it stopped.
rienbdj 3mo ago
I would love to see Elm adopt an effects system as an answer to React hooks.
gregwebs 3mo ago
I’m trying out foldkit.dev now. It lacks Elms elegance but you have access to ecosystem: it’s just Typescript. Here’s their Elm comparison: https://foldkit.dev/elm/foldkit-vs-elm-side-by-side https://foldkit.dev/elm/foldkit-vs-elm-side-by-side
jambalaya8 3mo ago
No offense to the coder, but I would have preferred the name elm to have stayed in my memory as an text-based email client. The language is alright.
- mjaniczek 3mo ago
  Thank you for another check on my bingo card.
iamwil 3mo ago
I think Evan's pointing at something, and everyone's looking at the finger. I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Acadia. In his talk, Economics of Programming Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8, he does reveal a peek at what he's been working on for the past seven years: a query language with functional ideas applied to them. He points at the boundaries in web apps that typically destroys type information: - language <-> storage - storage <-> wire What if we could preserve the type information across these boundaries? What would that buy us? One answer he had was easier migrations. They'd just be a type diff, rather than hand-written SQL. So I think the right question is, can we infer what Acadia is going to be like given the changes he's shipping with Elm? What does incremental compilation give query languages?
- crote 3mo ago
  > I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Arcadia. Considering Elm's history, why should anyone trust that Arcadia won't work out the same? No matter how good his ideas are, if Arcadia doesn't have a more future-proof community-focused development model nobody will adopt it. At best it'll end up being "the project that inspired XYZ". Evan might think it is about the Next Big Thing, and he might even be right, but after Elm will the world care enough to listen?
abrookewood 3mo ago
Am I right in thinking that Elm has lost a lot of momentum? It is barely discussed on HN anymore and I wonder if the releases/news have a lot to do with it. Look at the time between releases: 0.19.2 Faster builds, and the Road to Elm 1.0 Jul 2026 0.19.1 Friendly syntax hints, faster builds Oct 2019
- crote 3mo ago
  There's very little left to discuss, unfortunately. The 0.19 release included some extremely controversial changes. The core Elm team responded by killing all discussion of it and (to the outside world) abandoning the project, the Elm community responded by scattering to a dozen forks and reimplementations of The Elm Architecture. Everything which could've been said has been said a dozen times already. People have moved on, and Elm is mostly remembered as one of the web's greatest front-end could-have-beens.
nritchie 3mo ago
Is anyone using Elm with Tauri to produce a front-end for a Rust library? It seems like it could be a really nice combo.
xiaodai 3mo ago
wait? elm is not dead?
hahahaa 3mo ago
Evan is back! Now I know the love is back I might do some Elming!

Road to Elm 1.0

350 points by wolfadex 3mo ago

podnami 3mo ago

What is the point of actively choosing a web framework in the age of LLMs?

haute_cuisine 3mo ago
The point is the same as in pre-LLM.
mhitza 3mo ago
Stronger foundation (as to mean better tested), less accidental complexity of reinventing everything, transferability of knowledge, easier onboarding and review of changes. Your argument is a mirror of the snark question "why don't LLMs write in assembly?" for those not looking at the output at all.
the_gipsy 3mo ago
I haven't tried it, but Elm might be a really good fit for LLMs, because it forbids taking shortcuts.
- maicben 3mo ago
  It works really great with LLMs, it introduces less bugs compared with other languages
bbg2401 3mo ago
Professional diligence, perhaps? A desire to not be blindly led into the kind of narrow, often first-party stack which is so often proposed by Claude Code? With all due respect, not everyone is afflicted with the lack of care sufficient to allow them to launch vibe coded apps as low quality as https://podnami.com https://podnami.com. Considered technology choices are one such aspect of the practice of caring about what you're building.
pohl 3mo ago
If anything, LLMs make it easier to choose from a broad set of options. The tradeoffs are the same as pre-LLM days, but the learning curve is more favorable.
solumunus 3mo ago
Statically typed languages with compiler hints are the absolute best languages for LLM's to work with. Successful compilation is incredible feedback, and it basically just means that there is a higher chance that the feature is in a complete and working state at the end of each agent iteration.
akst 3mo ago
Sorry buddy this is hacker news, you probably meant to enter your prompt here --> claude.ai
mmmmbbbhb 3mo ago
I am also confused by this, and not just for web, but any dev technology. I personally couldn't care less what the llm is writing in.

OhSoHumble 3mo ago

Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.

ale 3mo ago
I know right. I’m glad DSLs have fallen out of fashion. Just use the platform.
- chipdale 3mo ago
  I can understand why developers might not care for DSLs, especially when they force a choice between entirely different toolsets and toolchains. However, I feel people often miss the real value of a good DSL: it's not about the syntax, but about providing hardened semantics that can bolster or guarantee desired qualities. Elm, for instance, provides value insofar as it makes producing runtime exceptions significantly more difficult. Personally, I hope languages like Lean, which provides exceptional support for creating DSLs within the language, renew interest in semantically sound DSLs, especially if we insist on using LLMs.
  - lioeters 3mo ago
    I recently learned about that too, how Lean provides ways to create new language syntax and DSLs, which is (on the surface) similar to Lisps like Racket. It's like operator overloading but way more flexible and general purpose. I'm wary of such language features, convenient for specific purposes (like working with vectors or matrices) but I'm afraid it's too powerful for normal usage, if everyone starts building their own DSLs and syntaxes, it would likely make the typical codebase difficult to read and understand. For example, the C++ template metaprogramming madness, it can be used responsibly but in my opinion it was detrimental to the language ecosystem.
  - rupertlssmith 3mo ago
    And then there are sealed DSLs... Byte encoder/decoder in Elm are opaque, so their implementation is hidden. A smart compiler, such as the one I am writing, can take advantage of that with compiler intrinsics that replace the implementation with something that the compiler itself optimizes.

whichdan 3mo ago

There's a lot to love about Elm, and I've written quite a bit of production code with it starting around 0.18.0. But in 2026 I'm not sure why a company would newly choose a language that hasn't otherwise been updated in nearly 7 years.

auslegung 3mo ago
Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.
- Munksgaard 3mo ago
  Does it though? They are many longstanding bugs reported in their compiler repository, and this release doesn't seem to address any of them.
  - auslegung 3mo ago
    Longstanding issues that prevent usage? Not for me and the projects I’ve been apart of. No doubt there are plenty of reported issues, and no doubt they truly negatively impact some users, but I would still much rather choose the usability and stability of Elm 0.19.1-2 than anything in the typescript ecosystem today
    - sheept 3mo ago
      When I worked on an Elm app in 2020, my users reported compatibility issues with various browser extensions (e.g. Grammarly, 1Password). I personally would prioritize making my apps usable for my users over making the DX usable for myself, so I stopped using Elm for future projects.
      - 1-more 3mo ago
        Oh yeah those are a bear: grammarly, 1password, and darkreader were the big ones, but translation was too. Elm assumes it's the only thing modifying the DOM underneath its root element; the extensions assume the DOM is free to be manipulated. NRI did a writeup on how they fixed it. https://blog.noredink.com/post/800011916366020608/adopting-elm-safe-virtual-dom https://blog.noredink.com/post/800011916366020608/adopting-e... The TLDR is to use https://github.com/lydell/elm-safe-virtual-dom/ https://github.com/lydell/elm-safe-virtual-dom/

dzonga 3mo ago

used elm between 2016-17. it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm. sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.

sesm 3mo ago
What's the Elm definition of simplicity? Genuinely asking, because the concept of simplicity is very vague and overloaded in programming.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- xn 3mo ago
  The Elm Architecture[1] makes it easy to reason about code. You render the current state. You create a new state by applying a message to the current state. 1. https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/ https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/
- threethirtytwo 3mo ago
  You really need to use it to see the light. It's like reading about programming and actually programming. You don't understand programming until you actually program. You won't understand why elm is simple until you actually use elm to the point of internal understanding. I think doing this is much harder nowadays given that most people would likely use an LLM to do most of the coding.
  - dzonga 3mo ago
    said it better than me.

asgr 3mo ago

love it see it :)

surprisetalk 3mo ago

I wrote a thing in 2023 about why I'm still using Elm: https://taylor.town/elm-2023 https://taylor.town/elm-2023 It's 2026, and I'm still using Elm for all the same reasons :) As an added bonus, Claude seems to play very very nicely with Elm: https://taylor.town/diggit-000 https://taylor.town/diggit-000

tensegrist 3mo ago
the list numbering in that first link is a bit surprising
metaketa 3mo ago
This. Generating a frontend with guarantees can almost not be done with any other language. If you use the graphql module with code generation it's an absolute game changer. Every time I have Claude generate a moderately complex frontend in react I regret it sooner or later due to state issues and inconsistent behaviour. Not with elm. Everything that makes it difficult makes it perfect for ai.

pyrale 3mo ago

> ... and others are more visible features like equatable and hashable types. I love Elm, and I love the community, but I feel a little gaslit here.

1-more 3mo ago
say more! Is it that it has typeclasses but they're closed?
- pyrale 3mo ago
  It is that even without an open typeclass system, these specific typeclasses have been a common request for a long while. I have worked at a few elm places, there is always a dict-for-everything dependency or local implementation.
  - 1-more 3mo ago
    Haha we may have worked together. Equatable has been a theoretically huge, actually OK hole in my opinion because it _can_ lead to runtime crashes but never has in any code I've written (\_ -> () == \_ -> () is a runtime crash). So I'm glad to see something more robust than "just don't do that." And "hashable" as the real thing you need to implement Set/Dict is a good idea imo. I'm sympathetic to keeping "comparable" closed and even smaller than it is for the reasons in this discussion [0]. In my perfect world, String would not be comparable as-is because string comparison should be locale dependent. Right now string comparison just ends up using JS's < operator which compares as a list of code units. So I'd like to be able to have a Set of Strings or a Dict with String keys without having the footgun of being able to think that I've alphabetized a list when all I've done is annoy a user by putting Área after Zapato and not between Azul and Barcelona. But I agree with you that the current solutions for Set/Dict all have one problem or another: You can use elm-sorter-experiment [1] but then you are writing a sort function and passing it around and maybe you don't want the overhead of that. You can switch to the Lamdera compiler and use containers [2] but then it's a different compiler and a you need to tweak your options slightly to compile an Elm project as an Elm project in it and it could get out of sync with the Elm compiler (extremely unlikely though). You can use any of the list/dict implementations that are really just lists with O(n) everything under the hood. So maybe this hashable type is going to make things better, idk. [0] https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/774#issuecomment-347267276 https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/774#issuecomment-3472... [1] https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-sorter-experiment https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-sorter-experiment [2] https://github.com/lamdera/containers/tree/main https://github.com/lamdera/containers/tree/main

auslegung 3mo ago

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than most, it’s stable, it has an opinionated architecture built into the language which causes most code bases to be very similar to one another

katemaster009 3mo ago
Fair point. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I would still hesitate if the ecosystem isn't moving forward.
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
On that note, because of AI I've been more into music, bought a midi keyboard, got real DAW software setup. I've also finally built more and more with Rust, and have been reading more Rust docs. LLMs should never be an excuse not to learn the things you're using it for, those are the bad engineers. An LLM affords me the time to research and learn what it gave me so I can maintain it. It's easier to prompt about the problem if you understand it.
- yonaguska 3mo ago
  If you have a blog or something anywhere, I'm very interested in your journey.
  - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    I do though I havent been blogging as much, its a blessing and a curse to have a SSG based blog. I would love to have an SSG engine that I can use remotely from anywhere, currently using Publii. https://giancarlostoro.com https://giancarlostoro.com
- eddd-ddde 3mo ago

bingemaker 3mo ago

I remember using Elm in one of my gigs. After I left, the client hated me. Not to forget all the drama that it had before Covid. I really want this language to succeed, but its bdfl is trying hard....

akst 3mo ago

Wish them all the best, I really respected the efforts made to normify some of ideas with unapologetic mathematic names like monads and such But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want to make a purely functional language locked down, you really should be upfront that they don't have time to make sure basic parts of the web ecosystem are arbitrarily locked off like i18n until they decide users of their langauge are permitted to use it after ruling out any suggestion it doesn't undermine the purity they were going for. https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264 https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264 Gonna be honest, really got the impression the maintainer here couldn't be stuffed looking to it, and wasn't personally impacted and largely didn't give a shit. Proceeds to run off some bullshit to dismiss the issue entirely about it being too risky (he had better things to do, and anyone he can delegate this too does too), the poster offers to do the work write a report, etc, etc. Then he's ghosted and for some reason the thread is shut after 10 days lol??? I guess giving him the dignity of a reply is out of the core teams hands because of how they arbitrarily configured their discourse. Don't blame that dude for leaving Elm, glad I never made the mistake of wasting my time being dependent on its infantilizating runtime. Look if you want to avoid being too coupled to the runtime your language exists in, sounds like a cool experiment, but maybe don't drag everyone along with you until you figure out the basic issues. All that is 6 years ago hopefully they're more self aware.

cmoski 3mo ago
The automatic closing of threads is so hostile to the community.
jerf 3mo ago
I see all these people complaining about Elm limiting privileges to certain Github projects. A sensible complaint. But why hasn't anyone simply forked Elm, made the small tweak to make the check function return true or whatever, and offer that as a download/patch to the community? I understand that defaults matter and that can have a large impact on the flow of libraries and code and stuff... my point is more, if you've got production code bases on this language, or at least, did 6 years ago, why so helpless? Nothing makes the point that an open source project can't dictate to its customers like the customers taking the "open source" part seriously. I don't actually expect that to "work". What I expect to happen is that in the second-order effects that it would resolve this matter one way or the other once and for all. Either the core language realizes they need to accept the change, or the community works around the blocker, or the core language goes closed source and removes all doubt and people can move on, including their production services.

lambdas 3mo ago

Did the restrictions on JavaScript get resolved? IIRC, they made it so you had to use their “Ports” mechanism to interface with JavaScript, and you couldn’t write your own wrappers. There was some drama when someone forked it so you could write your own JavaScript wrappers/FFI too?

miniBill 3mo ago
FFI is still mostly done through ports (or web components, for the view part). This is an intentional choice and likely to stay until 1.0 and beyond
- 1-more 3mo ago
  You can also do lunatic things like overload the `Object` prototype and get synchronous FFI by encoding then decoding an object. I do this at work to get locale-aware sorting. I know you know this, but it'll be news to others in the thread.
  - lolc 3mo ago
    Haha, yeah I didn't realize there would be a monkey patch route to FFI in Elm. Can't control the runtime. Is there a good read up on this technique?
    - 1-more 3mo ago
      Slightly important point: it's still safe FFI! Everything that crosses the JS/Elm boundary has to be encoded/decoded from serialized JS Objects. So it's hacky BUT it's not actually unsafe, which is kind of funny. I have an example where I use it to effect locale-aware sort. This repo is a benchmark test of that: https://github.com/perkee/elm-js-sort-ffi-speed-test/tree/main https://github.com/perkee/elm-js-sort-ffi-speed-test/tree/ma...
      - lolc 3mo ago
        Great hack, thanks! And yea I was missing some native string api when I abandoned Elm at 0.19.

willdr 3mo ago

Did they walk back that thing where certain language features could only be used by the Elm team? That seemed like a language-killer to me.

Munksgaard 3mo ago
Nope.
jacobjuul 3mo ago
what?
- sheept 3mo ago
  In Elm 0.19, they removed the ability for third party packages to provide native bindings for JavaScript APIs that the language or its official packages didn't yet support.[0] The only alternative proposed by Evan is to use ports, which are about as ergonomic as calling a function in a web worker. [0]: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826 https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826
  - 1-more 3mo ago
    there is also web components (best way to do a "copy this to clipboard" button in my experience) and secret back door synchronous FFI through overloading the Object prototype. In all cases the communication is gated through decoders/encoders that can fail; you can only pass serialized data across the boundary from JS to Elm.
- berns 3mo ago
  The compiler has hard coded domains that control who can use certain features. For example, custom operators aren’t allowed, but Evan is able to use them.
  - discardable_dan 3mo ago
    Why.... ?

imbnwa 3mo ago

So many casualties in that period of groping around in functional programming concepts for the frontend from, like, 2014 - 2020 or so. But a lot of good things endured from that at least.

desireco42 3mo ago

I hope to see progress in the future. I loved Elm and it made me a better programmer. Things changed a lot since then, but beauty of Elm is not matched by any language. Also, if you ever had to refactor anything, there is no language in the world that makes it as easy to change things. Hope to see more releases in the future.

mrkeen 3mo ago
You should try more languages
- desireco42 3mo ago
  I didn't downvote you, but what you have in mind? ROC maybe? I really have yet to experience joy as I did while writing Elm.

_joel 3mo ago

Is it me, the code examples look awful to read?

1-more 3mo ago
it's an ML family language. If you're not used to them they can be a trip.

chuckadams 3mo ago

I'm interested less in getting to Elm 1.0 than getting past Elm 0.19, which is the version that locked out all native modules that weren't officially blessed by Elm's author. Far as I can tell, that pretty well marked the end of Elm.

jgwil2 3mo ago

On the subject of functional languages with JS as a compilation target, is anyone still using PureScript?

ff_ 3mo ago
There are a few of us still at it :) Though with the advent of LLMs it became very easy to spin up alternate backends for it, so it's very much alive outside of JS as well.

Aurornis 3mo ago

We had some big Elm proponents who were trying hard to convince the company to use Elm, including doing proof of concept buildouts in Elm. Then the 0.18 to 0.19 Elm drama happened: The core team restricted the ability for users to do any native JavaScript interop, which broke every Elm app that needed any functionality that wasn’t in the core library. It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that they had invested in a language that now pulled the rug out from under them, and those who were true believers who told us that they trusted the Elm team’s decisions and we all needed to chill out and wait for them to address our needs, which they thought would happen soon. That was 7 years ago. There were some attempts to spin the lack of updates as “Look how mature and stable it is!” but you don’t have to look very deep to see that they just stopped working on it. Last time I went back to look at it there were several Elm forks, some maintained by former members of the Elm core team that were more active but never caught on. With the way the core team broke important functionality, ignored the user base, and then abandoned the project for years there is no way I would ever allow this near a production website. I know that will earn me some downvotes from the die-hard Elm fans, but I think it’s important context for anyone who finds themself in a situation where Elm is being proposed for an internal project. It was always interesting as an experimental niche framework, but not as something I’d ever want near a product that I had to maintain. Especially not something that had to survive across developer turnover when your company’s main Elm proponent left and the language was abandoned for years.

networked 3mo ago
> It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that they had invested in a language that now pulled the rug out from under them, and those who were true believers who told us that they trusted the Elm team’s decisions and we all needed to chill out and wait for them to address our needs, which they thought would happen soon. This sounds like evaporative cooling. https://lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-co...
gowld 3mo ago
It's amazing that business would tolerate paying staff to build products on one person's prototype hobby language.

bbkane 3mo ago

I think of Elm more as an incredibly influential research language these days. It's very focused, there's no public roadmap or official support and the leadership (which is far as I can tell is just Evan) is uninterested in most (any?) community building or core team building. But MAN is it nice to work in. This has resulted in several forks/spin-offs. At the recent Gleam conference, Louis Pilfold joked that every Elm user maintains their own compiler :). There are at least 6 of them (two more got announced in the last month, even as the community keeps shrinking). So I'm glad Evan is now working towards 1.0. Maybe folks can call Elm "finished" and one of the successors can do the hard work of unifying some of the forks and growing the community. Personally, the next time I'm looking for an Elm-like thing, I'm going to check out Gleam + Lustre. Seems to have a nice mix of maintainers that care about community and design. And it works on frontend + backend!

brokencode 3mo ago
Yeah Elm has had a very strange arc, but I think calling it a research language is right. There was a period where it was heavily evangelized. Many blog posts were written and talks given, and there was a lot of enthusiasm and adoption. Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled. Which of course he had a right to do since it’s his project, but I think he should have set expectations better from the beginning. The heavy evangelism helped spread the ideas, but also set up developers to feel blindsided and abandoned.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  > Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled. There was more to the story than that. They made some major breaking changes in v0.19 that broke a lot of apps and left no path for them to continue with Elm, then dug their heels in when the community protested. If you had an app at your company that used the features they decided not to allow any more, you either had to start deciding which fork to follow or start planning to rewrite your app in something else. That evangelism turned into an uncomfortable gaslighting where half of the community was trying to tell you that this change was what was best for the language and that you didn’t really need that feature anyway. There were several forks but I don’t know if any got traction. It felt like an already small community was fracturing into even smaller communities right after alienating a lot of people.

k_bx 3mo ago

We're now migrating to React, but have some very large Elm projects still in prod. The biggest thing for me from practical perspective was to "freeze" some pieces of DOM to be guaranteed to not change/re-created, so that it plays well with some external JS libraries expecting some nodes to not change and stay vanilla. Another is ability to extend Elm's debugger to filter out big noisy data to keep it usable for our project. Third is when your data is too big -- it just sometimes fails with "recursion limit" that's hard to debug due to the nature of the langauge. Otherwise – it's a very beautiful little language that still feels quite modern and easy to work with IMO.

novoreorx 3mo ago

It's been some years since I last heard about Elm, but I still rememeber how it blew me away when I first saw it

rupertlssmith 3mo ago

Worth noting there are some Elm to native code compiler projects now.

tasuki 3mo ago

I almost fell off my chair! Elm is easily my favourite language, and I didn't think it'd ever get another update. Thanks Evan!

dzogchen 3mo ago

Looks like for the first time in 7 years https://iselmdead.info/ https://iselmdead.info/ is accurate.

wxw 3mo ago

Back in my undergrad, I took a Functional Programming class taught in Elm. It was primarily about functional data structures, but we also got to build a web app using Elm towards the end. At the time, I didn't think much of it -- I was probably busy learning React and JavaScript and yada yada for employment purposes. Now, having spent some time in industry and having used some gargantuan web frameworks, I find myself missing Elm. MVC in Elm is wonderfully straight-forward and easy to reason about. Congrats on the road to 1.0! Glad to see Elm still active all these years later.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

adamwk 3mo ago

I can’t think of a worse announcement for your road to 1.0. Who cares? Without localization or accessibility support, it doesn’t make sense to call your UI framework production ready with a 1.0 version. I think limiting what third-party contributors can bridge from browser APIs killed Elm’s momentum for anything but toy projects. It now seems more like a sandbox for Evan to play around with compiler ideas than something meant for production use.

crote 3mo ago
On the one hand, it's good to see Evan's doing fine. He has some pretty good ideas about language development, and Elm has inspired quite a bunch of very interesting projects. On the other hand, seven hears of absolutely nothing, then a small compiler performance bump, and calling it the "road to 1.0"? No offense, but why bother? She's dead, we've grieved, and we've long since moved on. Until there's something genuinely mindblowing to release, I don't think many people are going to care.
shamsartem 3mo ago
I don't think what you say is accurate. I maintain an Elm app and it is fully localized and I think it has a pretty good accessibility Localization is done using one big record for each language, that I just pass into each part of the aplication that uses strings. It's very convenient cause I can use simple functions in the record where they make sense for plurals and special cases in different langauges Accessiblity is achieved with a combination of good html, ports and in some complicated cases (autocomplete-typeahead) - web components
kubb 3mo ago
I say let him cook. The real ones will know when it's good and ready, and hype driven folks can't be saved anyway.

song_synth 3mo ago

Any insight on comparing Elm to Yew? I once wrote a frontend webapp with Elm. And with backend server in Clojure, it made as much sense as Elm five years ago, right? :) For the past two years I've instead used Yew, a rust crate for building UIs. It can look like react or like Elm, it's up to you for how you yews it ;0) My latest app uses The Elm Architecture in Yew. It has been fantastic. I think the biggest benefit Elm has over Yew is its access to the node js ecosystem through Port. You can interface with any npm package if you (or your AI) can write a port for it. So far my best integration with yew dev has been using inline script tags (eek!) where I have to inject some external JS.

1024bits 3mo ago
I don't know about Yew but I've been using Iced 0.14 which is also a Rust crate inspired by the Elm architecture. It seems like Yew is specifically geared towards web applications, which I suppose is in some ways closer to the original Elm project. What is your app? Is it intended for personal use, or commercial?
- song_synth 3mo ago
  Iced looks nice! It would be super sweet to have a desktop + web cli with a mostly-shared rust codebase. You are definitely welcome to use my app, it is a music generation and education website! Monic Theory can be found here :) https://monictheory.com https://monictheory.com
  - 1024bits 3mo ago
    Nice! I'm quite the beginner when it comes to music production and theory (took me a while to even figure out "Audition" means "Listen"), so I couldn't make full use of this site, but I like ideas presented in your about section. The website is quite functional, which is nice to see from a Rust base. I'm interested in looking at more commercial products made in Rust, they tend to be far more polished than what I can stumble upon in Github (and are thus a nice showcase of what a bit of polish can do for these frameworks).

phpisatrash 3mo ago

[flagged]

otter-in-a-suit 3mo ago

I had dinner with Evan at Scala Days last year and had no idea who he was until he casually mentioned Elm. He is delightful and had some great insights on the philosophy behind Elm and on programming languages in general to share. I have little personal opinion on the state of Elm in prod (the little front end I do is as boring as it gets), but I’m glad to hear the language is still active.

threethirtytwo 3mo ago

I thought elm was dead.

alphanumeric0 3mo ago

I worked on an Elm project professionally for a few years, and I just finished upgrading an old React app to version 19 on my own, which took a greater part of a year. I can appreciate even more now why Elm is so opinionated. As much as Elm is a unique technical, research language, it is a huge cultural change, and I think that is why so many people left. Allowing libraries to be thin wrapper over ports is one example that goes completely against the Elm philosophy. I'm happy to see Elm is still around, and I hope one day people will see more value in it.

zoul 3mo ago
For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.

hoppp 3mo ago

Happy to see elm is still under development, I thought it stopped.

rienbdj 3mo ago

I would love to see Elm adopt an effects system as an answer to React hooks.

gregwebs 3mo ago

I’m trying out foldkit.dev now. It lacks Elms elegance but you have access to ecosystem: it’s just Typescript. Here’s their Elm comparison: https://foldkit.dev/elm/foldkit-vs-elm-side-by-side https://foldkit.dev/elm/foldkit-vs-elm-side-by-side

jambalaya8 3mo ago

No offense to the coder, but I would have preferred the name elm to have stayed in my memory as an text-based email client. The language is alright.

mjaniczek 3mo ago
Thank you for another check on my bingo card.

iamwil 3mo ago

I think Evan's pointing at something, and everyone's looking at the finger. I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Acadia. In his talk, Economics of Programming Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8, he does reveal a peek at what he's been working on for the past seven years: a query language with functional ideas applied to them. He points at the boundaries in web apps that typically destroys type information: - language <-> storage - storage <-> wire What if we could preserve the type information across these boundaries? What would that buy us? One answer he had was easier migrations. They'd just be a type diff, rather than hand-written SQL. So I think the right question is, can we infer what Acadia is going to be like given the changes he's shipping with Elm? What does incremental compilation give query languages?

crote 3mo ago
> I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Arcadia. Considering Elm's history, why should anyone trust that Arcadia won't work out the same? No matter how good his ideas are, if Arcadia doesn't have a more future-proof community-focused development model nobody will adopt it. At best it'll end up being "the project that inspired XYZ". Evan might think it is about the Next Big Thing, and he might even be right, but after Elm will the world care enough to listen?

abrookewood 3mo ago

Am I right in thinking that Elm has lost a lot of momentum? It is barely discussed on HN anymore and I wonder if the releases/news have a lot to do with it. Look at the time between releases: 0.19.2 Faster builds, and the Road to Elm 1.0 Jul 2026 0.19.1 Friendly syntax hints, faster builds Oct 2019

crote 3mo ago
There's very little left to discuss, unfortunately. The 0.19 release included some extremely controversial changes. The core Elm team responded by killing all discussion of it and (to the outside world) abandoning the project, the Elm community responded by scattering to a dozen forks and reimplementations of The Elm Architecture. Everything which could've been said has been said a dozen times already. People have moved on, and Elm is mostly remembered as one of the web's greatest front-end could-have-beens.

nritchie 3mo ago

Is anyone using Elm with Tauri to produce a front-end for a Rust library? It seems like it could be a really nice combo.

xiaodai 3mo ago

wait? elm is not dead?

hahahaa 3mo ago

Evan is back! Now I know the love is back I might do some Elming!