My OSSD group has decided on Gleam as our project to contribute to for the rest of the semester. Gleam is a young functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript and Erlang. The Gleam project includes a lot of components, including the compiler, the language server, and the website, but we’re targeting working on the compiler specifically. My teammate and I both find working on the compiler super exciting.

My teammate and I settled on Gleam after taking stock of both of our interests. We shared in common a goal of working on a challenging project. Daniel initially proposed etcd as foray into distributed systems but had little background in it. While I’ve taken a distributed systems course and have some familiarity, I was a little shaky on committing to it as a project. Distributed systems are hard, and given etcd’s ubiquity in the field (e.g. Kubernetes relies on etcd), I struggled to imagine how we could become familiar enough with the project to fix a non-trivial issue before the end of the semester. Instead, I proposed working on Gleam. Given Gleam’s 1.0 release was only a year ago, we found that the compiler had issues on GitHub open reporting relatively approachable bugs. And by virtue of Gleam targeting Erlang, Gleam is suitable for writing distributed systems, satisfying Daniel’s other interest.

Assessing other projects and finally deciding on Gleam took the bulk of our time in class, so we haven’t made progress outside of that. We plan to start reading code this week and hope to be able to make contributions soon!