Gleam language available in first stable release

Gleam, a programming language designed to ease the development of type-safe, scalable systems, is now available in version 1.0.0, the language’s first stable release.

Compiling to Erlang or JavaScript, Gleam was created by London-based developer Louis Pilfold. Gleam 1.0.0 was announced March 4. Developers can try Gleam from the Gleam Language Tour page. Public APIs can be found in the main GitHub repository for Gleam, covering areas such as language design, compiler, build tool, and the package manager. There are 234 packages available for the language. 

In a post describing the language, Pilfold said Gleam has a small surface area that makes the language easy to learn in one afternoon. Gleam has static analysis and a type system inspired by languages such as Elm, OCaml, and Rust, Pilfold said. The compiler serves as a programming assistant, offering additional context to help developers make changes; Pilford described refactoring in Gleam as low-risk and low-stress. The language runs on the Erlang virtual machine and JavaScript runtimes, enabling Gleam code to run in the browser, mobile devices, or elsewhere.

Future plans for Gleam include improving the Gleam language server and providing libraries that users will want when making production systems in Gleam, with an initial focus on websites and web services. Goals include continuously improving the developer experience, maintaining simplicity, avoiding language bloat, and not introducing breaking changes. Pilford stressed that Gleam was a community project with a host of sponsors. The largest contributor is Fly.io, provider of the Fly micro-VM platform.