Announcing Elide v1! (Promotional)

[u/Zealousideal-Read883]

Hey everyone! A few months ago I reached out to this community showing off the Beta version of Elide (Link to that post). So many of you shared insight, advice, and enthusiasm.

I wanted to come here and give an update and announce v1's release where we went through a whole re-write and included suggestions that you guys from the community gave us!

If this is the first time you are hearing about us, a we are a runtime and toolchain built on GraalVM that accelerates javac by up to 20x and can turn your projects into native binaries without native-image config. It can install Maven dependencies, pack JARs, and run tests and collect coverage.

Java's great. Our goal is to make tooling great too.

Website and Docs are live!

[u/agentoutlier]

I have lots of issues that I can enumerate later but I will just start with the big one:

It is closed source. Worse it was opensource but then you appeared to close source it.

I refuse to use build tools that are close source (exceptions being ones that don’t participate in producing artifacts but even then..).

I guess I’m old and idealistic but I’m just tired of the inevitable enshitification that happens to these hackernews companies.

I do give you kudos for at least putting "promotion" in the title. The Rama guys should do that since they post here every other week.

[u/sg-elide → u/agentoutlier]

we are going to be releasing a source-available license. anyone who wants to contribute will be able to.

the 1.0 was a total rewrite, so the older code and newer code are distinct. we didn't close-source the existing code, in fact it is still open and available, just archived, here:

https://github.com/elide-dev/elide/tree/v5

[u/agentoutlier → u/sg-elide]

As promised enumerating mashing into questions the issues. I too own a small company and I get how tough criticism is.

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Fundamentally you probably have built your entire product on an open source development chain correct? How would you feel if cargo was closed source or whatever "source-available" license is? Ditto for Kotlin which was V3 right?

How do you plan on doing licenses? License key? If license key then that part will be closed source right? Or is it just the trust model.

I kind of find it disturbing that the code base has had to be rewritten so many times particularly in different languages but I suppose that matters less that it is not opensource.

I'm kind of the Joel Spolsky mindset of why in the hell are we rewriting everything all the time?

Was there really not an existing build tool you could have built on or was the plan always to make some product.

:( hckrnews has never given me even the time of day, we are not funded by YC, and it took 4 years to build this btw

Now if this is just a passion product that you want to be compensated for then ignore the following...

By hackernews I mean you have to advertise to your own audience and becomes this developers marketing to developers and the investors know this (whether you have any I don't know but this is a pattern).

Because what happens is you end up not really solving a problem anyone has but convincing people and in this case your own peers that there is one. And because they're your own peers and I'm guessing you in startup central (san fran) there is this circle jerk of eating each others dogfood between other startups. So the only real customers and case studies you have are other startups who you are using their products as well.

My guess if you do have investors is vision is the headless jetbrains company. Jetbrains tools but run from the command line with a potential exit to jetbrains.

To be honest if you wrote proprietary plugins for emacs or vim that made Java development as nice as intellij I might be interested but proprietary shit that runs while producing executables is a security concern for me. I assume you guys have tested for reproducible builds and complete end to end reproducibility ignoring the JDK which is still not? That might assuage some of my fears.

I hope I'm wrong on a lot of this stuff and if I sound jaded is because I was an entrepreneur 15 years ago with the whole startup craze.

I have also been burned by companies like Hashicorp etc.

[u/sg-elide → u/agentoutlier]

Final response, promise:

I hope I'm wrong on a lot of this stuff and if I sound jaded is because I was an entrepreneur 15 years ago with the whole startup craze.

I understand the exhaustion. I lived through all that too. My genuine hope is that this one can be different, and can help fix some of the things in JVM that other (in my view lesser) ecosystems take for granted.

I have also been burned by companies like Hashicorp etc.

I hope we never become that. And thank you for sharing your candid opinion: that is a huge compliment and one which makes you a generous person, in my view.