Client-side web programming in Haskell: A retrospective

There&#x27;s one very important thing that people miss when they mention Elm vs PureScript (or others) which bothers me.<p>Here&#x27;s my message: Elm is playing the JS world&#x27;s game (obeying the rules) and it&#x27;s winning it!<p>- you can take a JS dev and they&#x27;ll be productive in two weeks in Elm<p>- the compiled code will be smaller than react&#x27;s<p>- compilation time is less than in webpack (and compiler&#x27;s reaction is under 0.2 secs most of the time)<p>- performance of your app is better<p>- no runtime exceptions<p>PureScript and others, unfortunately (at least in many cases), take a different direction: they don&#x27;t play the game at all, staying in their own, very different one. But hey, they have type-classes!

This post dismisses Elm on the basis of lack of typeclasses, but fails to mention miso (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;haskell-miso.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;haskell-miso.org</a>), that includes typeclasses. Miso is Elm-as-an-embedded-DSL written as a Haskell library for GHCJS that allows one to share types on the front and backend, take advantage of the entire Haskell ecosystem and has experienced commercial use.

Considering that Elm seems to be by far the most stable, usable and used alternative, just dismissing it for the lack of typeclasses seems a bit short sighted to me. Is this a case of avoiding success at all costs? :)

Of note v5-rc of PureScript&#x27;s Halogen helps with some of the complications. It&#x27;s been in RC for several months waiting for all of the documentation to wrap up, but I used it on a small project a few months ago and didn&#x27;t have too many problems outside trying to understand how to wire up requestAnimationFrame to emit events on init. It&#x27;s worth another look once it&#x27;s released.<p>Some documentation on the v5 changes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slamdata&#x2F;purescript-halogen&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Changes%20in%20v5.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slamdata&#x2F;purescript-halogen&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;d...</a>

Did you ever look at ScalaJS? I found it surprisingly pleasant and reliable, and while Scala is not Haskell, it is a mature language with typeclasses and probably the best tooling support (in terms of IDEs etc.) of anything in this space.

Maybe I&#x27;m missing the point here but I couldn&#x27;t see where this article mentions what they were trying to do in a web client.<p>Surely that should be the first variable to consider?

While there was a novelty budget consideration, I miss comparison for:<p>* ease of development<p>* time to learn the language<p>* documentation: tutorials, etc<p>* ease of hiring<p>Architecture is a tiny cost you have to pay for using something else.<p>Then again, for a consultancy using Haskell, PureScript is the right choice.

&gt; Our meeting notes are long and detailed, the brief summary: we don’t feel comfortable with GHCJS, Reflex is great but also costly (double novelty budget), Halogen is a better architecture than Elm. PureScript and Halogen come out as the best possible choice. Other things considered: ClojureScript, TypeScript, Rust, ReasonML, Elm, OCaml.<p>I would love to read these notes!

A summary at the top and maybe a table of all the options would be useful additions here.

Haskell in web rocks!