Is Elm dead?

No.

It’s true that there hasn’t been a new release of the Elm compiler for some time. That’s on purpose: it’s basically feature complete. As Elm’s creator Evan Czaplicki wrote in February 2021: “If you like what you see now, that's pretty much what Elm is going to be for a while.” His latest talk at Strange Loop 2023, “The Economics of Programming Languages”, provides insights into his current work, following his update from November 2021 and his GOTO Aarhus 2023 talk “Elm on the Backend” (video unreleased).

Why is that a good thing? First of all, it means Elm code lasts a long time, making us able to focus entirely on the project itself instead of frequently fixing stuff because of updates. It also means the language is very stable, because features are carefully thought out before being implemented.

While the language doesn’t get frequent updates, the community is more active than ever. Have a look at recent package updates, where a lot of work is happening. The Elm Weekly newsletter, the Elm Radio & Elm Town podcasts, and Elmcraft are great resources for getting a feel for what’s going on in the Elm world. Discourse and Slack are the main places where the community gathers online. Elm users also gather to share thoughts at the Elm Online Meetup. In the real world, after conferences were stopped by the global pandemic, the new (un)conference Elm Camp happened in 2023 in Denmark, and in 2024 in the UK.