For those that don't know its also built upon OTP, the erlang vm that makes concurrency and queues a trivial problem in my opinion.
Absolutely wonderful ecosystem.
I've been wanting to make Gleam my primary language, but I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021.
But I am hopeful that Gleam has slid just under the closing door and LLMs will get up to speed on it fast.
This isn't correct. It can compile to run on the BEAM: that is the Erlang VM. OTP isn't the Erlang VM; rather, "OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop [concurrent/distributed/fault tolerant] systems."
Gleam itself provides what I believe is a substantial subset of OTP support via a library: https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp
Importantly: "Gleam has its own version of OTP which is type safe, but has a smaller feature set. [vs. Elixir, another BEAM language with OTP support]"
The comment you are replying to is correct, and you are incorrect.
All OTP APIs are usable as normal within Gleam, the language is designed with it in mind, and there’s an additional set of Gleam specific additions to OTP (which you have linked there).
Gleam does not have access to only a subset of OTP, and it does not have its own distinct OTP inspired OTP. It uses the OTP framework.
Take for example this section of the Gleam website FAQ section:
https://gleam.run/frequently-asked-questions/#how-does-gleam...
"Elixir has better support for the OTP actor framework. Gleam has its own version of OTP which is type safe, but has a smaller feature set."
At least on the surface, "but has a smaller feature set" suggests that there are features left of the table: which I think it would be fair to read as a subset of support.
If I look at this statement from the Gleam OTP Library `readme.md`:
"Not all Erlang/OTP functionality is included in this library. Some is not possible to represent in a type safe way, so it is not included. Other features are still in development, such as further process supervision strategies."
That quote leaves the impression that OTP is not fully supported and therefore only a subset is. It doesn't expound further to say unsupported OTP functionality is alternatively available by accessing the Erlang modules/functions directly or through other mechanisms.
In all of this I'll take your word for it over the website and readme files; these things are often not written directly by the principals and are often not kept as up-to-date as you'd probably like. Still even taking that at face value, I think it leaves some questions open. What is meant by supporting all of OTP? Where the documentation and library readme equivocates to full OTP support, are there trade-offs? Is "usable as normal" usable as normal for Erlang or as normal for Gleam? For example, are the parts left out of the library available via directly accessing the Erlang modules/functions, but only at the cost of abandoning the Gleam type safety guarantees for those of Erlang? How does this hold for Gleam's JavaScript compilation target?
As you know, Elixir also provides for much OTP functionality via direct access to the Erlang libraries. However, there I expect the distinction between Elixir support and the Erlang functionality to be substantially more seamless than with Gleam: Elixir integrates the Erlang concepts of typing (etc.) much more directly than does Gleam. If, however, we're really talking about full OTP support in Gleam while not losing the reasons you might choose Gleam over Elixir or Erlang, which I think is mostly going to be about the static typing... then yes, I'm very wrong. If not... I could see how strictly speaking I'm wrong, but perhaps not completely wrong in spirit.
> Elixir also provides for much OTP functionality via direct access to the Erlang libraries.
This is the norm in Gleam too! Gleam’s primary design constraint is interop with Erlang code, so using these libraries is straightforward and commonplace.