Elm Compiler Written in Elm

Sad that they have to put a massive "Non-goals" full of emojis so the main Elm team does't feel threated. A languange doesn't lose anything with an extra compiler - a competing compiler is actually what Elm needs right now.

Hello! Author here. Didn&#x27;t expect to land on HN before the compiler is actually useful - Oto, you&#x27;ll pay for this! :)<p>Feel free to ask me anything about the project, although bear with me - I&#x27;m learning compilers&#x2F;... on the go, didn&#x27;t study them or anything.

eie.io would be an awesome domain name for this project. Too bad it&#x27;s already parked by a squatter as a &quot;premium name&quot;. (For non-native or non-Western English speakers, it&#x27;s a line from the children&#x27;s song &quot;Old McDonald Had a Farm&quot;.)

I know you&#x27;re not trying to replace the official Elm compiler, but that&#x27;s precisely what is needed. I really, really wanted to like Elm but the way it&#x27;s managed is horrible and antithetical to the idea of Open Source software. With the current compiler I wouldn&#x27;t touch Elm with a 39.5&quot; pole, even if Elm is a joy to work with.

I like it! I gather now you can compile Elm in the browser? It allows many things, similarly as F# with Fable, which allows to compile F# code in browser without a server.<p>Ability to compile code in browser allows to do sandboxes, or tools that otherwise would require a server.

I really would love to have this compiler have a llvm backend. I like the idea of a small FP language with amazing error messages. Haskell is too big and complex for me.

Serious question: how popular is Elm? I&#x27;ve recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven&#x27;t seen any job postings for it and so I&#x27;m wondering if it&#x27;s just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

AFAIK Elm can&#x27;t actually write to the filesystem, how does the compiler get around that? Or has Elm changed such that it can work outside the browser now?

Very cool! However, could they not compile the Haskell Elm compiler to JS using GHCJS and then write Elm bindings for it?

Great work, Martin! Excited to see how the project turns out &lt;3