Hey everyone! :wave: I was wondering if you ever ran into a situation where a certain problem was impossible to solve with Elm, even when using flags, ports or web components? So by impossible I mean there is no JavaScript solution and excluding altering Elm’s output or the compiler itself. Whenev…

I’d say it’s not always a question of what can’t be done in Elm, but rather what can’t be “reasonably” usable if done with Elm. For example, two years ago, I was working on image annotation for creation of learning datasets for computer vision. Visual feedback is a powerful tool when you give instru…

I would second this. Specifically algorithms which are tricky to implement in a pure language but which are at the “core” of some UI tend to spoil the broth. At that point you may need to move a significant portion of your application to JavaScript. Another limitation I faced was needing to ren…

I’ve seen an example from @toastal that didn’t seem to have a good solution: “In today’s episode of [Elm] limits: I have to rip out a bunch of code to calculate MD5s on files. Any MD5 library using Bytes will block the main thread. I’d send the File or Bytes out a port, but they’re not port-compatib…

Do you know if it was with a custom element? I had one I made a while back for encryption, and I adopted it for md5 hashes, https://ellie-app.com/8NZPSgYmTZGa1 . I guess this approach would be considered a solution outside of Elm. it is very similar to how the kernel code handles it in elm/file, but…

Not sure. It’s certainly a solution, but with custom elements, I think the question is where to draw the line. At one extreme, the whole app can be stuffed into a custom element :slight_smile: What I take from this example is that if you don’t know upfront that you have to implement that bit of fun…

Custom elements are a reasonable solution and they can be used for a lot of the problems that might arise. Most users will seldom run into limitations and out of those who run into a limitation very few will run into a problem that cannot be solved by ports or custom elements. And in the very unli…

It is impossible to build a program in elm that solves the halting problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem . Cant blame that one on a lack of FFI though.

Haha yeah I guess my definition of impossible can be refined further. I don’t expect it to solve unsolved computer science problems. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks a lot for all the replies so far! I guess the examples could be summarised with problems that require the browser’s low level API for performance reasons, which cannot be done in a performant way with decoding/encoding or in Elm. Maybe these can be solved in the future when Elm supports WASM…

What is currently impossible to build with Elm?

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hanifhefaz May 9, 2020, 5:50pm 11

I think this one also goes into the list.

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What is currently impossible to build with Elm?

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