Gleam is not Rust

Gleam is not Rust, and I'm sick of people comparing them. Here's why they're different.

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction and explanation
01:06 - Commonalities
02:31 - Design goals
03:41 - Performance vs Productivity
05:28 - An unpopular opinion
06:34 - Gleam use cases

#gleam #softwareengineer

[nemito]

You're absolute right. Rust it's like F1 car; there is a lot of things were it's the best vehicle, but it's not an everyday car.

[rodrigohmoraes]

It's very rare to watch a video about a specific technology and agree with every word said in it, but here we are, you took the words out of my mouth

[jenreiss]

Rust is all about control. It's a programming language designed to give you the most ergonomic possible access to the lowest level primitives. If you're a web developer and you've never asked yourself "Should I use Message Passing or a Mutex here?", you probably shouldn't be using Rust.

[kevincodes]

I recently did a full stack web development project completely in Rust for a university course and yes, it was very time consuming and difficult. I love Rust, but I would recommend a simpler and more specific language if developing prototypes or with hard deadlines. That said, the performance was noticing better than projects I have created in Django.

[gotxe]

Great video, thanks. It's a bit sad that it was needed, though 😢

I'm one of many who are hopeful about the "native" backend for Gleam, so we could get rid of Go as a "middle ground" option 🙏

[tears_falling]

Someone needs to make this kind of video but for Rust vs Zig instead.

[anonanon]

Just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate the phrase "don't compare...".
Why not?
What is this video if not comparing those two languages?
By all means compare them, just be mindful that the differences do not end on few simple characteristics.
If you compare soley on speed for example, only then you are making a mistake.

And of course this extends to other things "comparing apples to oranges", "don't compare my actions to this person's" etc.

[NotherPleb]

Sometimes I dream of a garbage collected mode for Rust that can use standard Rust ecosystem but when you write, all references are ref counted and you just don't care about lifetimes.

[dalanxd]

"Rewrite it in Rust" is 90% of the times just the Javascript PTSD taking place in the mind 😅.... "even then you should use GO" is a hard truth to swallow and thanks for saying that out loud! Great vid!!!

[nordgaren]

> Not Rust
> Looks inside source code
> Rust
😮

[reireireireireireireireirei]

Before this vid I thought my analogies were inane, but you sir take the cake with ease.

[kberestov]

Isaac, thanks for such a great explanation! Let me ask you a question of a developer who likes Elixir (and its great ecosystem) and suffers from lack of strong type system. From your point of view, is Gleam mature enough for production? Can it be considered as a replacement for Elixir (even if not now but in time)? At the moment it seems more like a concept...

[amirosman]

This is amazing, I’ve been interested in Gleam for a while now, I’m in a crossroad between learning Golang and Gleam. A lot of people keep recommending Golang, it’s understandable since Golang is a bit older and more popular but Gleam is really appealing, personally I love Erlang and the Erlang VM(Beam) and am planning to rewrite a TypeScript backend so, do you think Gleam a better alternative to Typescript?

[araozu]

One thing that you didnt mention about the difficulty of learning gleam/rust is pure fp. Not being able to do a loop and instead doing recursion is the first that comes to mind, but really everything changes from other languages, its a completely new paradigm. And id say that may even take as much time as learning to fight the borrow checker

[jondo]

You showed Kotlin in your video a language which often gets forgotten about. Does gleam have any influences from it? Kotlin has compose which let's you build gui very simply I could make an app without really reading about compose.

[funkdefied]

FINE. I’ll learn Gleam. This is a wonderful video.

[anotherelvis]

Great video -- You should probably also mention the absence of loops in gleam,

[aghileslounis]

What I find hard for now with Gleam is its standard library. You can't even build a simple web server simply, you need to use a package for that, and it's pretty uncommon and a lot different because it uses the actor model.

Also, there is no official doc on how to use concurrency, it's not clear, I can't find anything on the site that talks about that. There is nothing like the "goroutines" to build concurrent programs.
I know that there is a package to build concurrent programs, but it's not clear on how to use it.

I think that's the biggest problem and a huge downside compared to "Go" for example, where everything is straightforward. Saying that you can learn Gleam in an afternoon is not true at all. Learning how to loop and create functions, types and other basic things is obvious in all languages.

I really like the language, I hope it will get the documentation and the support it deserves, If I had the level to deeply understand the concurrency in Gleam, I would've gladly contributed.

[JEsterCW]

I like the comparison of gleam to go. Peole hate the comparison of gleam to rust and pretty often say that gleam is go, but functional one and honestly I totally get it cuz both languages are really simply-powerful and really productive, but the difference is that gleam is more functional.

[humanperson]

Great video. You have earned yourself a subscribed.
(also style seams very No Boilerplate inspired. Clear & easy to follow.)