Stream: ideas

Topic: multi-purpose glue

Brian Carroll (Apr 25 2023 at 19:26):

Richard when you said roc glue, did you mean roc docs by any chance?

Brian Carroll (Apr 25 2023 at 19:28):

Richard Feldman said:

come to think of it, roc glue is already pretty close to this :thinking:

I'm finding this a bit unintuitive, not sure what you mean by an API for a package website being similar to glue code.

Richard Feldman (Apr 25 2023 at 19:42):

one thing I'm starting to realize is that roc glue is actually useful for more things than just generating glue code

Richard Feldman (Apr 25 2023 at 19:42):

so pretend it's named roc gen

Richard Feldman (Apr 25 2023 at 19:42):

instead of roc glue

Richard Feldman (Apr 25 2023 at 19:43):

and what it does is you give it a "generator" .roc file which accepts a list of top-level exposed Roc types (including the doc strings associated with each type) organized by module, and that generator .roc file specifies the contents of the output files that should be generated when you run roc gen

Richard Feldman (Apr 25 2023 at 19:44):

in that world, you can use it for things like:

• generating host bindings ("glue")
• generating Elm types as well as JSON encoders/decoders so an Elm frontend can communicate to a Roc backend
• generating docs in a different format from roc docs

Bryce Miller (Apr 27 2023 at 00:15):

Is that just the glue functionality you’ve already planned or implemented? Because that seems… extremely powerful.

Bryce Miller (Apr 27 2023 at 00:17):

Using it to generate Elm types and encoders/decoders seems like it could possibly replace something like GraphQL

Bryce Miller (Apr 27 2023 at 00:18):

“What’s the spec for this endpoint?”

“Just import the module and your editor will tell you”

Brendan Hansknecht (Apr 27 2023 at 00:21):

It doesn't have any of the doc stuff yet, but theoretically you could make it generate the elm types for a roc app. That said, you would have to do a minor workaround because it is really only made to translate host types and not a random other type.

Spec is essentially the roc files here: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/tree/main/crates/glue/platform

Brendan Hansknecht (Apr 27 2023 at 00:22):

An example use is the rust glue: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/crates/glue/src/RustGlue.roc

Georges Boris (Apr 28 2023 at 10:37):

maybe we should move the discussion on multi-purpose glue to another thread? both for documentation and because it is interesting enough to continue the debate somewhere else! :)

Notification Bot (Apr 28 2023 at 10:53):

13 messages were moved here from #ideas > packages website by Anton.

Last updated: Jun 16 2026 at 16:19 UTC