alt Hacker News> Hi, I’m the creator of Gleam!
What's the state of Gleam's JSON parsing / serialization capabilities right now?
I find it to be a lovely little language, but having to essentially write every type three times (once for the type definition, once for the serializer, once for the deserializer) isn't something I'm looking forward to.
A functional language that can run both on the backend (Beam) and frontend (JS) lets one do a lot of cool stuff, like optimistic updates, server reconciliation, easy rollback on failure etc, but that requires making actions (and likely also states) easily serializable and deserializable.
Replies
This is also what really annoyed me when I tried out Gleam.
I'm waiting for something similar to serde in Rust, where you simply tag your type and it'll generate type-safe serialization and deserialization for you.
Gleam has some feature to generate the code for you via the LSP, but it's just not good enough IMHO.
Also. The lisp cam now generate serialisers and deserializers for some types iirc.
You can generate those conversions, most people do.
But also, you shouldn’t think of it as writing the same type twice! If you couple your external API and your internal data model you are greatly restricting your domain modelling cability. Even in languages where JSON serialisation works with reflection I would recommend having a distinct definition for the internal and external structure so you can have the optimal structure for each context, dodging the “lowest common decimator” problem.