The more languages on the BEAM the better 
joegiralt
mercyf
arcanemachine
joeb
ademenev
I was reading about it some time ago, and it looked really interesting, but after reading the docs I realized that there is one thing I absolutely love in Elixir and that is missing in Gleam is multicephalous functions. Not that I cannot go without them, maybe it’s just bias and I think that any Beam language should have it. Also, the ecosystem was not developed and it was not clear how to use existing Elixir/Erlang libraries
Are you currently using Gleam? What are your thoughts?
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tcoopman
Where did you find that word? 
I love gleam. I’d love it even more if interacting between gleam and elixir had some better support. I mean it works well enough but the difference between records and structs is enough friction for me that it’s not a great experience
0
ademenev
ancatrusca
New episode with Louis Pilfold - the most detailed conversation about Gleam’s design I’ve come across.
Worth knowing for the Elixir community:
The type system vs. let it crash question. Louis’s position: they’re not in tension. Static types eliminate a category of errors at compile time. Let it crash handles a different category - environmental failures, network partitions, external dependencies. Gleam removes some reasons to crash while keeping the BEAM’s tooling for the ones that remain.
The concurrency design choice. Gleam’s actor model lives in a library, not the language. This was deliberate: the right answer to typed message passing is still evolving, and a library can change without breaking language stability guarantees. Louis mentions Kotlin’s structured concurrency as something worth watching.
The thing he regrets shipping. The conditional compilation syntax. He actively doesn’t want more people to discover it exists. It’s in the language, it can’t be easily removed, and it illustrates why language design requires more patience than product design.
The JavaScript target. Lustre, Gleam’s web framework, outperforms mainstream JavaScript frameworks in benchmarks. The JavaScript interop boundary is deliberately kept somewhat rough - it preserves the freedom to change Gleam’s runtime data representation for significant performance gains.
tour.gleam.run is the recommended starting point - Gleam’s compiler compiled to Wasm, running in the browser, covering the whole language in an afternoon.
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