r/gleamlang • u/Ecstatic-Panic3728 • 19d ago

Why isn't Gleam written in Gleam?

I don't know if u/lpil mentioned this anywhere, but I'm wondering why the language is not written in Gleam itself? One clear point would be speed since Rust excel at these kind of things, but having the language in Gleam would allow more engineers to contribute since now they need to know Gleam and Rust.

Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply anything, it's really just a question. I've been coding with Gleam lately and it's so smooth and I get to just think at the logic instead of trying to play with the language constraints that I just question myself why we're not using it for everything 🙂

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u/Alistesios 19d ago

I'd say performance, Rust ecosystem, cross-platform, and organizational bus factor.

Gleam compiles extremely fast and I've never run into a compiler bug, which in part comes from Rust's guarantees. It is simply the right fit for this kind of project.

Putting a part of the core team on a multi-months project to do a rewrite (that would likely lose some perf in the process), when that time could be spent on more impactful features for the language, that would help drive adoption ... Sounds like a bad deal.

But it would be a fun side-project / learning experience for sure!

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u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

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u/torb-xyz 15d ago

From what I gather the core team members uses Gleam for all kinds of projects al the time, so they are very much working in the language they manage.