Optimising for maintainability – Gleam in production at Strand
11 comments
·August 28, 2025stephenlf
Beautiful. I’ve taken a few cracks at learning Gleam, but I found I quickly get stuck in abstraction hell—building types on types in types without coding any behavior. I would probably have more success learning Erlang first, just to get a handle on those functional patterns the BEAM was built for. I should take another crack at it.
GavinMcG
For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s much about Gleam’s design that is specific to “the functional patterns the BEAM was built for.” If you’re getting stuck in abstraction hell, consider asking the community for advice on what would be more idiomatic.
throwawaymaths
Just FYI: unlike many pure FPs, building types on types is generally not a pattern that you do in erlang (or Elixir) and is largely considered an anti pattern in both communities.
You might not get the "handle" you're looking for?
giacomocava
Amazing to hear success stories of Gleam in production! Running on the beam really feels like a super power
0cf8612b2e1e
For Gleam//Erlang is there an easy way to package up an executable you can distribute without also shipping Erlang?
jdiff
Yes, I've created single-file Gleam executables by compiling to JavaScript and then using Node's experimental SEA (single executable application) feature. As a bonus, typically I've found the JavaScript targets to run a good deal faster for number-crunching tasks.
0cf8612b2e1e
How big is a hello world executable in that case?
jdiff
Hefty. The process is effectively just injecting all of the JS into the Node interpreter executable, so it's the size of the interpreter plus whatever you stuff inside. It's close to 50MB.
lpil
No, the VM needs to be installed on the machine, similar to C#, Java, Python, etc.
There have been some projects for creating self-extracting executable archives for the VM, and some projects for compiling BEAM programs to native code, but nothing has become well established yet.
WJW
You can compile to javascript as well.
> “We’re heading into a new age of AI-assisted coding, and right now, it’s difficult to predict how that will play out. But if I had to place a bet, I would say that in the long run, AIs are more likely to generate high-quality code in a language like Gleam. Gleam makes it quick and easy for AIs to check their code, get instant feedback, and iterate. That should be an advantage compared to languages that are slow to build, have cryptic error messages, and can’t catch mistakes at build-time.”
Interesting point and one I haven't seen before. Almost like arguing that AI will work best with things it can learn quickly, rather than things that have lots of examples.