alt Hacker NewsI've been interested in Gleam, but I didn't realise it just transpiles to Erlang, I thought it compiled directly to BEAM bytecode. Bit of a turnoff to be honest, I really don't want to deal with transpilation.
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Gleam used to compile to Core Erlang (Erlang Intermediate Representation) but looks like it now compiles to pretty-printed Erlang.
https://blog.lambdaclass.com/an-interview-with-the-creator-o...
It makes perfect sense to target erlang and not BEAM directly as allows erlang compiler to optimize the code for the newer BEAM runtime with newer fancier opcodes.
Yes, unfortunately transpilation comes with real downsides. Up until recently, logger events, error messages and stacktraces were displayed in Erlang formatting. It has improved in few cases, but not all, and the line numbers in stacktraces do not align with the source code. And if you want to use a REPL, you must use Erlang/JS ones, etc.
What do you mean by deal with transpiration? Elixir and LFE also both compile to Erlang and then run the BEAM compiler to generate bytecode. Erlang is the only BEAM language which goes to bytecode directly today.
Which part do you feel like would be an issue? When you run `gleam compile`, it will automatically call the Erlang compiler to finish the job.
I find it very handy that the intermediate Erlang (or JS) files are available in the build directory. It lets you easily see what form your code will take when compiled.