[wheatBread]

I think so! I'd like to get Elm running way faster than JS in browsers (which is possible thanks to some design choices) and that'd involve getting all this together. That opens things up on lots of different platforms, including servers. I also expect the next release to make things nicer on node.js as a first step in this direction. Point is, I think we'll start seeing folks doing server stuff, and it's a goal of mine to generate machine code for lots of reasons! It's a big project so I'm not setting a timeline at this point though.

Also, thanks for taking a look at Elm! I think of it as a member of "the ML-family" of languages and I draw from a lot of lessons from working with these tools and seeing what issues have come up for other folks, both within the typed functional world and not.

[david-given]

Actually, while it's still not direct machine code, if you can target Javascript as a backend I bet you can target Lua, which has very similar but less weird semantics; that means you get to run it on LuaJIT. That gives you a tiny, very very fast VM and garbage collector.

[corysama]

I'd be very happy with Elm compiled to WebAssembly as a stepping stone on the way to fully native :)

[wheatBread]

You need a garbage collector either way, so doing one implies you have pretty much succeeded at the other. So it's like two stepping stones that are right next to each other and quite a long jump away :P I think we'll get there though!