Nothing ruled out using ports, I’m sure we could have made it work. But we had a bunch of different areas where native code made exploration simple, and Elm’s structured approach made it difficult to get a first working version. I had put them in the Elm slack but they got lost cause there’s no archive, but from memory we use native code to:
- cache generated HTML
- introspect the DOM to see what is “next to” the user
- introspect the DOM to see the width of some text
- create random integers (without passing the random state throughout the whole app)
- (there’s at least 2 more, I’ll add them here if I remember)
We’re in a really early stage of our app where it’s really important to us to quickly try things and see if they work in the product, and Elm got in our way by making us do it “the proper way”. Doing it the proper way is great long term, but it can be a real drag on experiments.