Yesterday Elm 0.19.1 was released with a new improvements to the compiler that now display syntactical errors in a new fashion that pointing users to their mistakes as well as suggesting them additional resources. The goal of 0.19.1 is to clean up the rough edges such that we have a really solid foundation for newcomers, professionals, scientists.
Evan Czaplicki, the creator of these improved error messages explains in a blog post, “the new error messages points to the spot where it got stuck, but more importantly, it tries to help by (1) giving examples and (2) linking to a page that explains how imports work. It tries to help you learn!”
For example, if you miss out on including a curly braces in your JavaScript code, the error message shows up at the very end of the file. Now with the improved Elm compiler, the error message will point out the error where it occurred while also suggesting a viable fix.
Source: Elm’s blog
Czaplicki hopes that this project can eliminate the survivorship bias present in the programming ecosystem, which he believes is also one of the reasons why it took so long for Elm to prioritize this project. “I hope this work on syntax error messages will help make Elm more friendly and accessible, and I hope it will help make space for other language designers to prioritize this kind of project!”, he adds.
Other improvements in Elm 0.19.1
- Faster compilation, especially for incremental compiles
- Uses filelocks so that cached files are not corrupted when plugins run elm make multiple times on the same project at the same time.
- More intuitive multiline declarations in REPL
- Various bug fixes (e.g. –debug, x /= 0, type Height = Height Float in –optimize)
Developers on Twitter appreciated Elm’s focus on errors.
I'm impressed by how the new 0.19.1 Elm release is focused on errors, this is colossal work!
— Veronika Romashkina (@vronnie911) October 21, 2019
It's really cool to see Elm 0.19.1 will ship "intensional store model" idea, where even if module A depends on B and B source code changes, if the public api of B hasn't changed, there's no need to recompile A.
— Domen Kožar (@domenkozar) August 20, 2019
Read more about improved error messages in Elm 0.19.1 on this blog post.
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