Shout out to Giacomo's twitch streams. He has taught me about some features of Gleam, Rust, and on top of that he's just a very chill person. He takes time away from his focus to answer questions politely and without judgement. There are dozens of programming streams where the streamer forgets to leave their ego at the door and he is not one of them. I highly recommend following it.
to those curious, erlang abstract form[1] is the AST representation used by the erlang compiler/etc. per [1], you can see that it's canonically made of erlang terms, and you have easy access to routines for manipulating this representation from the standard library; it's really comfy when you need it! it's also the target elixir compiles down to, and the representation manipulated by parse transforms, which in base erlang are the way syntactic sugar (notably qlc[2] and some of the more cutesy pattern matches in merl[3] (which, in turn, manipulates the very same representation to do its job. very meta!)) is done.
most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.
Gleam is such a beautiful language. I wish I had the opportunity to use it more. If it could compile (transpile) to a native target like rust or go, it would be truly perfect.
This raises an obvious question. Why Gleam team weren't doing that in the first place? Obviously they didn't have direct Gleam AST -> Erlang source pipeline, they must have had to build some their own custom Erlang AST representation that they then translated into the source code.
We did not (and still don't) have an internal Erlang AST representation in the compiler. Previously we did have a Gleam AST -> printing algebra -> Erlang source pipeline, now we construct a buffer of bytes with the data encoded as Erlang Term Format.
Source was the previous target as at the time Erlang Abstract Terms was not established as the go-to format (Core Erlang was more popular but it did not have a stable API outside of the BEAM, so Gleam's in-Rust compiler could not construct it), and due to the newness of the language having an "escape hatch" where one could abandon Gleam and eject to Erlang was highly valuable. It also meant we could use the Erlang build tool until the Gleam one was ready for use.
Before the "and", "but", "so", "while", etc. — while most European languages, indeed, (usually) require commas before conjunctions, English is following a somewhat reversed convention. Well, at least the author remembered that they need to omit a comma before "that".
i dont think anyone actually cares unless you are in english class or someone wants to feel smug on the internet (you can ignore the 2nd one completely).
idk, i'm not sure about wording.
erlang abstract form still is erlang source, it's ast of erlang source text.
one call to erl_prettypr:format and text source is back.
word 'transpiler' is still there and there is nothing "pejorative" in it, it's transpilers all the way down everywhere.
but talking pejorative, i was surprised.
my opinion of gleam was already pretty low, but i did not expect to see post-1.0 compiler emitting text erlang source.
maybe it's not that good of idea to implement compiler in language completely foreign to target ecosystem.
I don't think your "it is source as you can convert it back into source" argument holds water as all the Erlang formats can be decompiled into Erlang source code, including the final bytecode itself.
I think you're overthinking the cost of compiling to source, and also underestimating how common it is.
[edit - this might have been ambiguous. I meant that it shows he really cares about the fine details.]
most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.
1: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/erl_parse.html#t:abst...
2: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/qlc.html#q/2
3: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/syntax_tools/merl.html
Source was the previous target as at the time Erlang Abstract Terms was not established as the go-to format (Core Erlang was more popular but it did not have a stable API outside of the BEAM, so Gleam's in-Rust compiler could not construct it), and due to the newness of the language having an "escape hatch" where one could abandon Gleam and eject to Erlang was highly valuable. It also meant we could use the Erlang build tool until the Gleam one was ready for use.
[0] Australian Government Publishing Service's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers, ISBN: 978 0 7016 3648 7
[1] The Canadian style: a guide to writing and editing https://archive.org/details/canadianstylegui0000unse
The lack or excess of commas doesn't upset any reasonable person in the slightest.
but talking pejorative, i was surprised. my opinion of gleam was already pretty low, but i did not expect to see post-1.0 compiler emitting text erlang source. maybe it's not that good of idea to implement compiler in language completely foreign to target ecosystem.
I think you're overthinking the cost of compiling to source, and also underestimating how common it is.