Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brabel 1403 days ago
It was pretty obvious that at some point, someone would fork Elm, given how Elm has always preferred purity over practicality... but it's not clear how this fork improves things even after reading the (tiny) documentation... can you expand on that?
2 comments

It seems to address the important problems with Elm, around its overly restrictive project management, by 1. introducing more flexible package management (e.g. you can depend on a fork of a core package, or a private git repo etc.) 2. being open to adding various missing web APIs (e.g. while I'm not sure it's there yet, I expect websockets to make a return, which were dropped with Elm 0.19) 3. generally going for an open development model (even just not having to wait years to fix trivial crippling bugs in the compiler is a step forward...).

The other part is that I have a good impression of the person/people behind it and could see it sticking, for whatever that's worth.

Lead developer of Gren here. It's great to see people being interested in the project, thanks for the mention!

Just wanted to add that both websockets and indexed-db is being worked on by members of the community. I'm hopeful we'll have them ready for the 0.2.0 release in December, alongside preliminary nodejs support.

Since the 0.1.0 release, we've added support for local- and session-storage, which was another often-requested feature for Elm.

> I expect websockets to make a return, which were dropped with Elm 0.19...

Websockets were dropped?? It seems support was introduced with subscriptions in Elm 0.17[1] as a great feature?? How did that happen?

[1] https://elm-lang.org/news/farewell-to-frp

The official reason is here: https://github.com/elm-lang/websocket

I believe it's quite possible to support websockets with the current language features, though, and I hope that websockets will be ready for Gren along with the 0.2.0 release in december.

> Elm has always preferred purity over practicality

Elm preferring purity is its practicality.