[wende]

Hi there, First of all, thank you for the post! It really made my day to see us land on HN I'm glad you like the idea. About the traction, I think I've got a mentality that makes it a little bit more bearable - even if it turns out nobody wants to use the project, I know I will so I'll always try to develop it and spend at least a weekend on it from time to time.

Regarding the questions: 1. It's quite a long story which I'd be willing to tell one day, maybe at some conference. Basically, the idea started from 'typed elixir' which was a small POC project of mine. The Idea was to introduce type inference and annotations using only Elixir's macro system. It had a type inference algorithm I wrote in Prolog (to this day I'm still amazed how easy this language made it) and a bunch of hacky macros. However, after about half a year into development, I realized it's not a project that can be done singlehandedly and that there is simply too many compromises and hackishness to it. Half a year later on a LambdaDays 2016 conference in Kraków, Poland during a rather boring talk I've wrote a simple transpiler of Elm to Elixir as a joke just to find an entertainment. But the longer I developed the joke to more apparent it started to be it's actually something completely doable and with a great potential value.

2. Unfortunately no, not yet. It is being developed by me and sporadically by two other members of my company, but it's in no way supported by any big player. We'd love to get an interest like that though. If by any means some company representative is reading that and considering, please don't hesitate to mail me!

3. Depends on what we mean by production - is it running as a node of a huge Erlang system? - no, and probably won't be for some time. It's still a relatively young project with a lot of space to develop, it is slowly approaching maturity though and I think after we introduce an official way of handling side effects it's going to get much more traction. If the question is of "Is there anything big written already in Elchemy?" then kind off. I'm pretty sure that the biggest project written in Elchemy today is... Elchemy itself. Being self-hosted was very important to me and it is even a part of the CI pipeline right now. The moment of it being able to compile itself and execute in Elixir was a huge milestone in the development and a definite point in time when the project stopped to be just a Proof of Concept. We are currently working on a demo game written in Elm on the frontend and Elchemy on the backend. Its purpose is to demonstrate the maturity of the project, but also pinpoint some possible shortcomings that we might have missed. That's the main reason for starting the Elchemt DevBlog on Medium (https://medium.com/elchemy) to share on the progress and possibly discuss different choices we still have to make

As it's already becoming quite long-ish feel free to join our Gitter chat (https://gitter.im/elchemy-lang/Lobby) or to mail me!

Cheers