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by not-much-io 3653 days ago
From what I understand Elm is planned to target Node eventually. However the language is pretty young right now and the main work is going into making client side Elm the best it can be. The language author doesn't want to branch out too far.
1 comments
hibikir 3653 days ago
Not quite: It's planned to target Beam, Erlang's VM. It's an easy fit for Elm. Still, not going to get done any time soon.
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ryanplant-au 3653 days ago
Elm on Beam would be some kind of beautiful dream.
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twoquestions 3653 days ago
Do you have a source for this? I'd be interested in their reasoning.

You'd think Beam would be a very different compile target than JS, and it seems weird to make such a huge change without very good reason.

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pmarreck 3653 days ago
I think "massive concurrency" and "bulletproof uptimes" are pretty good reasons. Plus that would then allow Elm on both client and server.

The Elm folks have been fairly buddy-buddy with the Elixir/Phoenix folks, so this doesn't surprise me

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twoquestions 3653 days ago
That sounds amazing.

It makes my heart sing that a different VM than JVM or .Net is gaining more traction, and as a static types fan it makes me happy that a statically typed language may be getting on Beam.

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adam_albrecht 3653 days ago
Richard Feldman (who works with Evan Czaplicki at NoRedInk) mentioned it in the Elm slack channel.

http://i.imgur.com/pqk9oMl.png

It will definitely be a very different compile target. But Elm really doesn't take any inspiration from Javascript, so I don't think it will change much about the fundamentals of the language. Of course they'll need to add capabilities for concurrency, OTP, etc.

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knewter 3653 days ago
I think the compile target is basically not a big problem, and there's been explicit work to make the Browser just one Platform. Also, see the `Process` module in the core docs for a hint of the future, regardless of where it lands (this would also work well for WebWorkers etc, and is handled right now by a naive scheduler). Concern over the compile target should be super low - if you've built a language of sorts, you should have a feel for how it's not that big of a deal to tweak the target.
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jtwebman 3653 days ago
This is a great idea as Beam doesn't force typing like JavaScript so it would be a great add. I wonder how they are going to tie in OTP?
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