Gleam: No more dependency management headaches

[NewsBot]

A new Gleam blog post/announcement has been posted!

Gleam is a type-safe and scalable language for the Erlang virtual machine and JavaScript runtimes. Today Gleam v1.12.0 has been published. Let's take a look at the highlights.

Understanding dependency conflicts

Gleam packages use semantic versioning, and they specify what ranges of releases they are compatible with to ensure that all selected versions are compatible with each other. This is very useful in ensuring that you don't end up stuck with invalid versions that cause the project to fail to compile, or are broken in more confusing subtle ways.

This does, however, mean that sometimes you will have conflicts when adding a dependency, as there's no version which is compatible with the existing versions you have locked. Historically this has been very confusing as we've haven't able to display much useful information when this happens.

error: Dependency resolution failed
An error occurred while determining what dependency packages and

versions should be downloaded.

The error from the version resolver library was:
Unable to find compatible versions for the version constraints in your

gleam.toml. The conflicting packages are:

app
wisp
mist
gleam_otp
gleam_json

It's not clear at all what the problem is, or what the programmer might need to do to resolve the problem. This is not fun for them at all.

Thanks to a lot of hard work from Jak and a new release of the underlying pubgrub version solving algorithm library Gleam will now provide much clearer error messages:

error: Dependency resolution failed
There’s no compatible version of gleam_otp:

You require wisp >= 1.0.0 and < 2.0.0

wisp requires mist >…

Get the full details here: No more dependency management headaches