What makes Mint unique?

[s0kil]

For example Elm offers no runtime exceptions, which is amazing.
What makes Mint amazing ?

[handicraftsman]

Embedded features of libraries like React, Redux, Aphrodite, etc.

[gdotdesign]

Pretty much what @handicraftsman wrote. In Mint everything is built in so to speak.

I'm writing a post about comparing it with a popular JavaScript stack (which I post here when ready), in it I compare are all the things Mint has built in to their counterpart in the JS stack:

• view (virtual DOM) -> react
• global state handling -> redux
• routing -> react-router
• formatter -> prettier
• development server + production building -> webpack (babel and it's plugins)
• package manager -> npm
• type checker -> flow
• documentation generator -> esdoc
• styling -> styled-components
• testing framework -> jest, enzyme

On top of this there are 300+ nice error messages, easy JS interopability and probably some small features I am forgetting.

Mint is still young there will be more features added in the future check them out on the roadmap.

[s0kil]

@gdotdesign So Mint integrates does libraries behind the scenes? Or just offers what those libraries offer?

[gdotdesign]

@DanielSokil It just offers what those libraries offer, except React which is integrated as the view layer.

[s0kil]

@gdotdesign One drawback of having react + redux, etc is the large bundle size, I was wondering if same applies to Mint?

[gdotdesign]

I think bundle size using Mint can be generally kept low, the "runtime" (https://github.com/mint-lang/mint-runtime) currently is ~150kb minified, 100kb of which is React.

The bundle size of the Mint website (https://github.com/mint-lang/mint-website) is 69kb gzipped (~280kb extracted) which contains the styles as well.

There are two things that could make this even smaller:

• dead code elimination - because of the type checking in theory, not used components / modules / functions could be removed during compilation, it's something I'm planning to implement in the future
• replace React with something smaller, possibly Preact. For this I need to experiment to see if all the features needed are supported.

[s0kil]

@gdotdesign For dead code elimination, would I need to use a tool like rollup, or that feature will be built into Mint?

[gdotdesign]

@DanielSokil It will be built into Mint.

[gdotdesign]

I've added this question to the FAQ in the readme pointing to this thread, so I'm closing this.

[s0kil]

@gdotdesign Thanks very much for your detailed responses.

[ghost]

Preact would significantly lower the size

[ghost]

Very interesting language!