[eterps]

From the FAQ:

Do I need to have Elm installed to compile my .elm files with Elchemy?

Elchemy uses Elm to typecheck your program. It is possible to use it without Elm on your machine, while it's not advised.

So it seems that it literally transpiles Elm syntax to Elixir, the type safety relies on Elm apparently.

Targetting BEAM directly should be possible in the future, to me it looks like an attempt to save a lot of time to make Elm suitable on the server side.

[wende]

This. There's no need to rebuild everything from scratch and fail due to too much to do. If the project grows more we can think about going low level. However, right now we can use everything that Erlang has, everything that Elixir has and most of what Elm has. It's a huge time and effort saver