Glyn: Type-Safe Pubsub and Registry for Gleam Actors with Distributed Clustering
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Gleam
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Distributed Systems
The HN community is excited about Glyn, a type-safe PubSub and registry for Gleam actors with distributed clustering, and discusses its potential applications and the benefits of using Gleam.
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Aug 22, 2025 at 6:29 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Aug 22, 2025 at 8:14 PM EDT
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Aug 30, 2025 at 5:08 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Tiny bit of self promotion since it’s easier to link out to my own words than type them again. Typed actors in Gleam are so damn powerful. https://www.tcrez.dev/2025-07-13-gleam-otp-101.html
My language of choice is Rust, but I’d go with Gleam in a heartbeat if I:
- Were working on a team with junior engineers
- Building a web app
- On a passion project, or in a business context where the lack of ecosystem etc. wasn’t a concern
For my own projects or with other senior folks, Rust’s complexity is a price you pay once and you reap the rewards forever afterwards. But Gleam’s simplicity would really shine in an organization with a wider range of experience levels.
My biggest complaint besides the obvious ecosystem stuff is that the most popular frontend library leaves something to be desired. It’s SPA-first, which seems like a very strange decision to make in 2025.
This resonated with me. Will use it in the future when I explain why I use Rust for almost everything.
It’s not! Lustre is very flexible and can be used in many different ways, including LiveView style server components. It’s not limited to SPA.
It won’t be as elegant as Lustre, but I figure it may be helpful for adoption if React/Vue/Svelte can be used on the front end.
With the server-side routing, Inertia doesn’t feel quite so SPA-first.
Then one could write performance critical sections in rust and interface with it more easily.
One interesting aspect of this approach is that if you want Gleam’s type safety guarantees, it requires explicitly decoding dynamic terms into Gleam data structures.
The latest version of Glyn amortises the cost of the decoding by performing it once per cluster node, then using the local typed messaging system to deliver the message to local subscribers.