By ByteBot
Gleam scored 70% developer admiration in Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey, placing second only to Rust’s 72%. For a language that hit version 1.0 just 20 months ago, this is remarkable. While Rust dominates every conversation about type safety, Gleam quietly proves there’s another path—one that combines the BEAM virtual machine’s legendary concurrency with modern static typing.
The Survey Numbers Tell a Different Story
Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey shows Gleam beating established languages like Elixir (66%), Zig (64%), and Swift (65.9%). Yet only 1.1% of respondents reported doing extensive development work in the language. That gap matters more than you might think.
High admiration with low adoption isn’t a red flag—it’s a strong signal. This isn’t viral hype. It’s engineers discovering something genuinely better and wanting to stick with it. Among those early adopters, 8% already have Gleam running in production. For a language younger than most CI/CD pipelines, that’s not just promising; it’s validation.
BEAM Plus Type Safety: The Underrated Combination
The industry has been stuck in a false dichotomy. You pick Rust for memory safety and performance, or you pick Elixir for massive concurrency and fault tolerance. Gleam challenges that binary choice.
The BEAM virtual machine has powered WhatsApp, Discord, and telecom systems for 40 years. It handles millions of concurrent actors, never-stop-the-world garbage collection, and hot code swapping in production. It’s battle-tested infrastructure that scales to billions of messages. What it lacked was compile-time type safety.
Gleam brings exactly that. No null values. No exceptions. Type errors caught at compile time, not in production. The type system borrows ideas from Elm, OCaml, and Rust—languages that proved static analysis prevents entire classes of bugs. But Gleam runs on infrastructure already proven at scale.
You don’t have to choose between Rust’s safety and BEAM’s concurrency anymore. That’s the story.
Simplicity Scales Better Than Power
Rust has a notoriously steep learning curve. Developers spend months fighting the borrow checker before becoming productive. Elixir offers power through metaprogramming, but macros create maintenance debt and onboarding friction.
Gleam bets on simplicity. The language is small enough to learn in an afternoon. There’s one way to do things, not ten. The documentation explicitly states the design goal: optimize for reading and debugging code, not writing it. That’s the hard part anyway.
Strand, a London marketing agency, started using Gleam for a single API integration with the UK government. They liked it so much they rewrote other services. Now they’re migrating their entire database backend layer. That expansion pattern doesn’t happen with languages that frustrate teams.
The Gleam compiler itself is written in Rust. The team switched from an Erlang prototype specifically because static types made refactoring faster and safer. They practice what they preach.
Enterprise Validation and Reality Check
In April 2025, Thoughtworks added Gleam to its Technology Radar in the “Assess” ring—languages worth exploring for enterprise use. Thoughtworks doesn’t add technologies lightly. Their assessment: Gleam “makes BEAM a valid contender for many projects” by bringing type safety to the ecosystem.
The GitHub repository has 20.8k stars and 273+ contributors. Fly.io, a major BEAM platform provider, sponsors the project. These aren’t vanity metrics; they’re indicators of serious engineering investment.
But let’s be clear about limitations. Gleam is still niche. The ecosystem is smaller than Rust, Go, or Elixir. Functional programming has a learning curve. You’re betting on a younger platform with fewer Stack Overflow answers and fewer production war stories.
Here’s the counterpoint: 70% of developers who use Gleam want to keep using it. That retention rate suggests the trade-offs are worth it for the right use cases—real-time services, microservices, distributed systems where BEAM’s strengths shine.
Don’t Sleep on This
While the industry debates Rust versus Go for the hundredth time, BEAM developers just got their type-safe future. Gleam combines 40 years of proven concurrency infrastructure with the safety guarantees modern teams expect. It’s not trying to replace Rust or Elixir. It’s carving out space for teams who want both reliability and scalability without the complexity tax.
The Stack Overflow survey is a leading indicator, not a lagging one. When developers who barely know a language already want to keep using it, that’s not hype. That’s signal.
