Hi friends! Not a ton of stuff happening right now since I've been traveling and attending to personal things. Here's this week's brief update:
New Features
- Added a section in the bottom right to view calls to
Debug.log.
Community
- Deleted Ellie's Twitter account. If enough people are interested I can write about why I chose to do this.
In Progress and Experiments
- Started rewriting the build manager in PureScript.
- Began reworking the way Ellie determines if a revision is yours in order to prepare for GitHub auth, Gist import, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Top comments (3)
That's a great new feature!
Also, if you find the time, I'd love to hear about the decision to use PureScript, and what other options you weighed it against.
Totally! So Ellie's current build manager is a direct port of
elm-maketo Elm. It works and it's fast enough, and were I to leave Ellie as closed-source I probably wouldn't change it. The issue is: some of the code in the build manager requires writing Native modules in order for the whole thing to be understandable. Since this seems to pop up every couple of months as a charged subject in places like the Elm subreddit, I'm uncomfortable with Ellie being used as an example of a large, open-source project that "needs" Native code. I don't support any argument that Elm should have direct FFI to JS, so this weighs on me. I figuredelm-makeis written in Haskell anyway, it probably would be an even clearer and easier port to PureScript and would no longer be something people can use to argue for JS FFI in Elm. Plus PureScript is really fun!The only other option that I think I could try would be to fork elm-make, exchange any file system stuff for code that writes to IndexedDB, and then compile everything with GHCJS. But the filesize concerns as well as the lack of control over parallelizing calls to the compiler pushed me toward PureScript.
So trello.com/c/1JZG6ibi/30-rewrite-b... should be moved to in progress?