Elm Test Distributions
15 comments
·May 1, 2025ibizaman
That’s really cool. I learned to love (stateful) property testing through a project at work to migrate drivers for MongoDB. https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2024-02-27-stateful-property...
jiehong
How Elm doing? Still v0.19.1 at first glance.
Anybody has an accurate view of the current status?
ch4s3
Basically dead. The core hasn’t been touched publicly since 2022, and the package ecosystem is closed. People will argue that it’s still usable but the fork ROC has more traction.
tasuki
You could say "dead", or you could say it's done, complete.
I'm a backend developer by trade. Because of Elm, I take every opportunity to do frontend. Elm made me love frontend.
Yes, there are things that are missing. Web sockets? Tough luck, it's ports! Or maybe you don't need web sockets.
I'd take Elm over the alternatives (cough React cough) anytime without hesitation.
ch4s3
Elm has a bunch of known bugs that the BDFL isn’t fixing, and he totally fucked js interop with the promise that more packages were on their way then he stopped approving new packages.
Evan abandoned an unfinished project and rug pulled a lot of people with the 0.19 release.
terminatornet
roc isn't a fork of elm, it's more inspired by the language and run by a former elm core team member.
ch4s3
Yeah I was mistaken, the fork is gren.
jweir
There is the Lamdera compiler
https://github.com/lamdera/compiler
We don’t use it though. Elm 0.19.1 just works. New packages and plenty of support. It’s difficult to comprehend in a world of endless updates that maybe something doesn’t need updates.
tasuki
I don't have an accurate view, but I understand Evan is up to something. He likes to take his time.
Nice! "testing your test code" is particularly important when dealing with PBT distributions, especially when your generator gets more complicated.
Tyche [0] is another cool tool for addressing the same problem, visualizing the PBT distribution but not making assertions about it.
[0] https://github.com/tyche-pbt/tyche-extension