Gleam Rewrite from Dart?

[neon tinsel]

https://gitlab.com/TricolorHen061/bad-word-blocker-filter/-/tree/main/lib?ref_type=heads

This is my Dart codebase. It's for my Discord bot's message filter. It's really messy, so I want to rewrite it.

I am considering rewriting it in Gleam. However, I was wondering how good of a language Gleam is for this. If you look at the code, there's a lot of dealing with strings, and iterating through enormous lists (200,000+ items). This code will be run about 2-3 times per second. Could Gleam handle this?

[cinder thunder]

Funnily enough you are not the first person to consider this! Here's a fosdem talk where someone talks about using gleam to build discord bots: https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/beam_gleam_intro/

[neon tinsel]

I'm not trying to build my Discord bot in Gleam. That's already done in Dart. 🙂

What I am considering doing is ONLY making the filter in Gleam

[cinder thunder]

Ah I see. Well Gleam can compile to Erlang or JavaScript, if that helps you get a feel for its performance characteristics 🙂

[mint wolf]

if that kind of performance is a concern, I think you'd be unhappy with any garbage collected runtime. maybe rust or some other language with zero overhead memory management?

that's definitely some serious volume you're hoping to handle

[steady oak]

I don’t think GC is quite so straightforwardly related. In theory GC should have higher throughput than conventionally manually managed or RC’d memory

Manually memory management and RC excel when you need consistency in the overhead, or have tight memory constraints, but in exchange it has a larger performance overhead compared to an appropriate GC so you’ll have less data throughput per minute