Glyn: Type-safe PubSub and Registry for Gleam actors with distributed clustering

Really enjoyed my experiments with Gleam! Such a lovely, simple language, and it’s clearly been made with great care and attention to detail.

My language of choice is Rust, but I’d go with Gleam in a heartbeat if I:

- Were working on a team with junior engineers

- Building a web app

- On a passion project, or in a business context where the lack of ecosystem etc. wasn’t a concern

For my own projects or with other senior folks, Rust’s complexity is a price you pay once and you reap the rewards forever afterwards. But Gleam’s simplicity would really shine in an organization with a wider range of experience levels.

My biggest complaint besides the obvious ecosystem stuff is that the most popular frontend library leaves something to be desired. It’s SPA-first, which seems like a very strange decision to make in 2025.

Wow I never expected to stumble across a library I created while scrolling hacker news! :)

One interesting aspect of this approach is that if you want Gleam’s type safety guarantees, it requires explicitly decoding dynamic terms into Gleam data structures.

The latest version of Glyn amortises the cost of the decoding by performing it once per cluster node, then using the local typed messaging system to deliver the message to local subscribers.

I had no idea Pubsub was still a thing. Seems like it hit the scene right around when Google kneecapped the whole RSS platform.

So excited to see this! I hand built a shitty version of this for a small project. Need to switch when I get a chance.

Tiny bit of self promotion since it’s easier to link out to my own words than type them again. Typed actors in Gleam are so damn powerful. https://www.tcrez.dev/2025-07-13-gleam-otp-101.html