The discussion centers on whether Gleam's ergonomic design and type safety make it a superior choice for AI-assisted development compared to mainstream languages, despite its smaller ecosystem. A significant portion of the conversation is dedicated to debating the community's political activism and code of conduct, with some users citing these as deterrents while others defend them as standard anti-harassment measures.
137 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4gleam-lang
gleam
Rust2018–2026
gleam-lang / gleam
gleam
⭐️ A friendly language for building type-safe, scalable systems!
30Distinct people
41Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
22.1KGitHub stars
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What it is
⭐️ A friendly language for building type-safe, scalable systems!
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Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year41 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-10-10 18:11:05 UTC to 2026-03-17 15:01:00 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 7 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
41 sourcesALAlupis·Mar 17, 2026Submission
2 points · Open discussionI don’t know anything about gleam. I couldn’t find anything as “shoving political ideologies” on their code of conduct https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUC...
Examples?
In I tried Gleam for Advent of Code> Perhaps this is a packaging issue on my system though.
Gleam is only officially distributed via the releases on GitHub [1] so if you pick up Gleam from a package manager that's always maintained by someone else. I think most of those community distributions do include Erlang and bits which is probably what pulled in all those extra packages!
[1]: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/releases/tag/v1.13.0
In Gleam OTP – Fault Tolerant Multicore Programs with Actorshttps://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/discussions/3633
About the only argument I find remotely convincing from language devs (Nim is another similar lang) is that they don't want to maintain anything extra. Fair enough. The other arguments they roll out are always specious. The stuff in the issue above is comical: default GH tab width is 8, don't want Gleam to look weird to people looking at Gleam on GH, so force 2 spaces.. lol. Sometimes it seems like lang maintainers get a little too far up their own arses about this stuff. Your v0.x just-past-toy lang with a weak std lib and barely any ecosystem isn't turning off potential adopters because of how default indentation looks on one - arguably the worst - forge.. it's turning adopters away because of these silly hills you choose to die on. Nearly all mainstream langs handle spaces or tabs; f
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orcing 2 spaces is just more "perceived strangeness", as a maintainer on that issue put it. It's your lang, do as you like with it, but if you want growth, don't be arbitrarily rigid.
I have to fully agree. They have a discussion on their GitHub [0] about tabs/identation stating that the design goal is to have a non-configurable formatter.
I get the idea behind having a streamlined formatting style, but I’m really not a fan of denying users the flexibility to adjust it to their needs. Consistency across projects is nice, yet forcing everyone into a single indentation style feels unnecessarily rigid. A little configurability would go a long way :)
[0] https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/discussions/3633
In Gleam is my new obsessionAs someone who has used both SML, Haskell, Rust and Elixir professionally: No, not really.
Access to the BEAM is nice, but unless you're targeting the BEAM in your compiler I don't see any benefit. Even if you're targeting the BEAM, you might decide to use another language, cf. Gleam: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/
Edit: Actually, one thing I will mention is the superior support in Elixir/Erlang for pattern matching bitstrings[0]. Not usually helpful in compilers, but an evolution of pattern matching that other languages should take up, in my opinion.
0: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#%3C%3C%3E...
In The BeamI see that there are many comments on full debug builds, but for me the most important difference are incremental build times when making minor changes. In my opinion this is what speeds up the development iterations.
Here are my build times when making a trivial change to a print-statment in a root function, comparing nightly dev vs adding cranelift + mold for rust-analyzer[0] (347_290 LoC) and gleam[1] (76_335 LoC):
$ time cargo build
Compiling rust-analyzer v0.0.0 (/home/user/repos/rust-analyzer/crates/rust-analyzer)
# nightly
Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized] target(s) in 6.60s
cargo build 4.18s user 2.51s system 100% cpu 6.650 total
# cranelift+mold
Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized] target(s) in 2.25s
cargo build 1.77s user 0.36s system 92% cpu 2.305 total
Compiling gleam v1.0.0 (/hom
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e/user/repos/gleam/compiler-cli)
# nightly
Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 4.69s
cargo build --bin gleam 3.02s user 1.74s system 100% cpu 4.743 total
# cranelift+mold
Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.99s
cargo build --bin gleam 0.71s user 0.20s system 88% cpu 1.033 total
For me this is the most important metric and it shows a huge improvement. If I compare it to Go building Terraform[2] (371_594 LoC) it is looking promising. This is a bit unfair since it is the release build for Go and this is really nice in the CI/CD. Love Go compilation times and I thought it would be nice to compare with another language to show the huge improvements that Rust has made.
$ time go build
go build 3.62s user 0.76s system 171% cpu 2.545 total
I was looking forward to parallel front-end[3], but I have not seen any improvement for these small changes.
[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer
[1] https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam
[2] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform
[3] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html
*edit: code-comments & links + making it easier to see the differences
Gleam: A friendly language for building type-safe, scalable systems
9 points · Open discussionGleam has a 1.0 release candidate
4 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 41 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.