I am starting with Elm. – Is version 0.19 from 2019(!) the one I should install?
Thanks for pointers!
0.19.1 is the latest
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Thanks for this. Will install it from the release page,
However, I am curious: Why is there no development on the Elm compiler since 2019? Is it bug-less and cannot get new useful features? Or is everybody using a fork I am not aware of? I don’t think the Elm community has diminished totally, or has it?
Thanks in advance for explanations.
This Lore: What is Evan working on? provides a decent explanation of what Evan has been working on for the past handful of years. The tldr is there’s been private work, Evan’s been experimenting with backend stuff. Elm isn’t bug-less but critical bugs tend to be fixed quickly. E.g. the elm/json package just got a new version last week after a security vuln was identified.
There are also some forks that people use here and there depending on what you’re building. Many of the forks are for conversions of the compiler to Elm itself, allowing you to compile in the browser. There’s also Lamdera, a separate project on top of Elm that was open sourced this past year. For more full forks (not sure for how to describe the style of forks) there’s Gren and Guida. Guida is a currently backwards compatible fork with plans to diverge and Gren has already diverged.
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There are a few bugs but none that are too serious. There is a good engineering split between compiler and core packages too, with them serving different roles - compile for the language, core packages for the runtime. There was a core package patch released just this week, even though the compiler itself did not get a new release. That split goes some way towards justifying Elms very slow compiler release.
The other side of the story is probably one of life choices and priorities and so on, it is open source but a system that is tightly owned.
There is also the elm-janitor which collects bug fixes to the core packages, although it does not have a full mechanism for distributing the results and involves running a script to overwrite the local install.
I am optimistic about Elm finding a more plural way forward with all these soft and hard forks.
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Thank you @wolfadex & @rupert. I was not fully aware that the Elm language is so “tightly owned” (although I had heard about it).
It’s all fair enough – and has probably advantages too. I don’t what to appear as expecting something. I was just curious before I dive in. 
I would say that the Elm language is not tightly owned. It’s licensed under the MIT license and there are various forks as described above. The Elm organization, however, is tightly owned.
Maybe I mean tightly managed instead of tightly owned. It is open source, but contributions are not reviewed or merged terribly often. Therefore serious efforts to fix bugs coming from the community tend to get stalled on the amount of work needed to turn a contribution into a new distribution of Elm. Not a complaint or criticism, just trying to explain the reality of how it is.
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