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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Not to hijack the thread, but does anyone know what's going on with Elm right now? There hasn't been a release since Oct 2019 or any real communication from Evan (that I can see in public) for quite a while.

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It's funny, I don't believe Elm itself needs much (if any) modification- the language is in a great spot, as are the core libs. I

f you care about it winning the "language wars", it needs more PR, examples, success stories, and tutorials. Here, I'm happy to have contributed in some way(s).

I have to disagree. Elm especially needs to be updated. That’s because Elm limits your interactions with browser. You can’t use browser APIs in Elm. (We can nitpick that ports and web components are some form of an escape hatch)

Internationalization API is a great example. We should leverage the platform but we can’t.

From my brief experience of trying to move onto 0.19, it broke the few project I had running on elm and the path forward wasn't very straightforward. JS interop and dealing with json are both still tedious and awful. I really want to want to use elm, but I'm not sure I can justify putting in the time.

JS interop via webcomponents is "the way" (vs ports). Re JSON decoding, agreed, and we cover in the episode: it's a solved/solvable problem that isn't popularized via a nice package...yet. But I think you've zero'd in on the pragmatic pain points; webcomponents is the revelation that was missing in the communication on the migration from 18 to 19, unfortunately.

I use web components as a workaround for elm being anti-component. It's infuriating. It makes me write JS instead of elm and obviously that causes lots of problems. The elm testing framework makes testing web components impossible too.

Elm has tons of low hanging fruit still. Evan just chooses to ignore them and look down his nose at any use case that doesn't work in elm currently.

This is probably the first I'm hearing of using webcomponents. I'd be interested to read about packages that help with JSON.

The guide has a whole section about web components/custom elements https://guide.elm-lang.org/interop/custom_elements.html. I've also found them useful in my code outside of Elm as they work in vanilla JS.

Elm is very stable and Evan keeps working on private repo before the next release. He talked about the explorations:

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/where-can-we-find-the-roadm...

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/status-update-3-nov-2021/78...

Evan no longer works at the company NoRedInk that had been sponsoring his work on Elm, but has resurfaced to let folks know he's doing fine, doesn't need financial support, and still has no news to share on his plans for Elm.

> Elm 0.19.1 will be stable for quite some time, but you can get some idea of the ongoing compiler work here: https://github.com/elm/compiler/blob/master/roadmap.md

from: https://elm-lang.org/news

Sure, but that's a "taking a step back" notice from over a year ago.

*[edit] essentially nothing has happened for over a year https://github.com/elm/compiler/commits/master

https://iselmdead.info/

https://dev.to/lucamug/elm-2021-a-year-in-review-4pho

Still alive and kicking (there are a few "is Elm dead" meme webpages at this point, all saying "no" and explaining the development model)

With all due respect, the core language still has open issues the look valid and are unaddressed and no real code has been added for over a year, and in the case of elm/html 3 years.

People have posted trivial PRs for crashing bugs in the compiler from alt accounts to not get banned. And of course they aren't merged.

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