[antew]

I'm so glad to see this, congrats to Evan and everyone who helped get 0.19 out the door!

I've been working in Elm for about a year now and it is a joy to work with, moving from vanilla JS/Angular/React to Elm has been a boon to productivity and I actually have confidence that when I refactor something and have fixed any compiler errors that it is going to work.

[jxxcarlson]

Just wanted to say what a joy it has been to work with the 0.19 compiler. For the project at https://knode.io, it was a game-changer: the elm/parser library is so fast that it makes live rendering of LaTeX to HTML a reality.

See

- Demo: https://jxxcarlson.github.io/app/miniLatexLive/index.html

- Blog post: https://medium.com/@jxxcarlson/elm-0-19-its-parser-and-minil...

Many thanks to Evan for this amazing release. The wait for it was very much worth while. Faster compiling, smaller asset size, and more. Yay!!

[eksemplar]

We had a lot of trouble doing things without typesafety and declarations, so we tried a few things. Elm was one of the better ones, and we migrated a few minor systems to it. A few others to typescript and we even made a few pocs with Xamarin and Wasm.

Then one of my older employees randomly watched “JavaScript the better parts”, and recommended it to me and we’ve been doing classless JavaScript ever since.

Elm is great, certainly one of the better alternatives, but now it really feels like a step backwards.

[spuz]

What is classless JavaScript? I don't understand how you had trouble doing things without typesafety but found that going from JavaScript to Elm is a step backwards? Maybe I'm missing something here?

[jxxcarlson]

One more point. Writing something like the MiniLatex parser would be somewhere between impossible altogether and nightmarish without an expressive type system. Below is the definition of the type of the abstract syntax tree (AST) for MiniLatex. Just eleven lines of code. Yes, I know. No typeclasses in Elm. But Elm's type system is surprisingly expressive, and with it one can do some rather sophisticated work. I've been very happy with it.

    type LatexExpression
        = LXString String
        | Comment String
        | Item LatexExpression
        | InlineMath String
        | DisplayMath String
        | SMacro String (List LatexExpression) (List LatexExpression) LatexExpression 
        | Macro String (List LatexExpression) (List LatexExpression) 
        | Environment String (List LatexExpression) LatexExpression 
        | LatexList (List LatexExpression)
        | LXError (List DeadEnd)