Consider other options than Elm

[casperin]

I really like Elm, but the language is immature. Again today, after having spent about an hour digging through source code of different modules because of poor documentation (Turns out you need to manually import this otherwise quite neat little module in order to work with the output of this module) I run into yet another problem that this time I don't think I can hack my way around. (The first one being about a jumping cursor in input fields).

I'm not set in stone about changing; but I do think it's worth considering other options.

Vanilla

• Good
  • Fast development time
  • Fast code
  • Learn js and dom (again)
  • No reinventing the wheel
  • More reasons here: http://gormcasper.com/posts/fast-html/
• Bad
  • We would be moving a lot of the frontend logic to the backend, so we need more than "just" an restful backend
  • Complexity in the frontend grows fast with no real architecture or principles for building and adding stuff. It could easily grow into jQuery soup (sans jQuery I guess) over time
  • JavaScript
  • DOM

React/Redux with Typescript

• Good
  • Typed
  • I/We know it
• Bad
  • We wanted to explore stuff
  • It's boring
  • Code is verbose as hell

ReasonML

• Good
  • OCaml (yay for learning something new!)
  • Typed
  • Got a big company behind it
• Bad
  • Ocaml (We already have Go... if we want OCaml, then why not use that both back and front?)
  • Facebook :'( ... I'm so tired of big corps
  • Compilation process seemed complicated
  • Very immature target (the language spec is basically a moving target), so who knows if we won't just run into same type of problems?

Hyperapp

• Good
  • Little code -- It's basically an Elm architecture/framework in JS
  • Little library (apparently jus 1kb)
  • Simple
  • It's Javascript (we can do all the hacks that js can do)
• Bad
  • Not typed unless we use Typescript (is that possible?)
  • It's Javascript (we can do all the hacks that js can do, even when we shouldn't)

Other

• Gopherjs
  • I don't really know anything about it
• Vue
  • I don't know enough about Vue to do a pros/cons list on that, but I personally have no real desire to work with it again (I tried it for a super tiny project)
• Choo
  • You tell me. You like it; but is it at all mature? Can it handle routing for instance?
• Angular
  • No

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I think I might actually mock something up in Hyperapp (+ its router).

[casperin]

I pushed a few branches. One of them being a hyperapp proof of concept

[casperin]

Settled on Hyperapp.