I’ve just published the first video in a new series of live coding sessions where I’m developing with Gleam and Lustre to build the front end for a desktop app built with Go and Wails.
The first video is a bit of test of my recording setup where I walk through a minimal test of connecting Gleam to the Go based Wails back end via its generated JavaScript functions that always return a Promise, and are therefore a little tricky to handle in Gleam. It was quite a relief to come up with a fairly simple mechanism for calling the JavaScript functions through Gleam’s excellent “Externals” Foreign Function Interface (FFI) and end up with a usable Lustre Effect.
During the “Gleaming Wails” Always Developing series I’ll be replacing the Snippet Expander desktop app’s Svelte based UI with a Gleam based one, continuing my quest to learn Gleam, which I very much enjoy working with, but unfortunately don’t get to do full time.
As it’s a chunky piece of work that I’m signing up for, hopefully this project will help me get more familiar with the Gleam language and Lustre framework, and help hone my functional programming skills in general. Even though I’ve been programming for well over 40 years now, and getting paid for it for nearly 30, I’ve mostly been working with Object Orientated style languages, and so functional programming doesn’t come easily.
With luck, along the way some people will learn a thing or two from my fumblings, or get excited about having a go at programming with Gleam.
You can follow along while I code (mostly) in Gleam on my YouTube channel.