Gleam is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional high-level programming language that compiles to Erlang or JavaScript source code.[2][7][8]
Gleam is a statically-typed language,[9] which is different from the most popular languages that run on Erlang’s virtual machine BEAM, Erlang and Elixir. Gleam has its own type-safe implementation of OTP, Erlang's actor framework.[10] Packages are provided using the Hex package manager, and an index for finding packages written for Gleam is available.[11]
The first numbered version of Gleam was released on April 15, 2019.[12] Compiling to JavaScript was introduced with version v0.16.[13]
In 2023 the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation funded the creation of a course for learning Gleam on the learning platform Exercism.[14]
Version v1.0.0 was released on March 4, 2024.[15]
Gleam includes the following features, many common to other functional programming languages:[8]
A "Hello, World!" example:
import gleam/io pub fn main() { io.println("hello, world!") }
Gleam supports tail call optimization:[16]
pub fn factorial(x: Int) -> Int { // The public function calls the private tail recursive function factorial_loop(x, 1) } fn factorial_loop(x: Int, accumulator: Int) -> Int { case x { 1 -> accumulator // The last thing this function does is call itself _ -> factorial_loop(x - 1, accumulator * x) } }
Gleam's toolchain is implemented in the Rust programming language.[17] The toolchain is a single native binary executable which contains the compiler, build tool, package manager, source code formatter, and language server. A WebAssembly binary containing the Gleam compiler is also available, enabling Gleam code to be compiled within a web browser.
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