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Gleam, Coming from Erlang

I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.

I wouldn’t bother with persisting the entries to a data store, although I would keep a file cache of XML responses to rebuild the state on app restarts without spamming the source sites. The final result was very close to this initial design, with the exception that I opted for a persistent_term instead of an ETS table, since I didn’t want to get entries by key but read the full list on every request. Some digging revealed there’s a gleam export erlang-shipment command that will build the project with Erlang modules in production mode, and with an entrypoint script to run it (provided erl is in the path):

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