Last year, I wrote a post with some numbers for the Elm community and projects. Back then, people were concerned that the ecosystem was going stale. A year later and following the release of Elm 0.19, some of this concern evidently remains, as I still see comments like this: “Elm was trending up in popularity, and around the time the kernel module changes were announced, it started trending down in popularity.”
I thought it would be interesting to see what happened with the numbers:
| Metric | 03/2018 | 05/2019 | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub repos | 10557 | 13830 | +31% |
| GitHub users | 823 | 1074 | +30% |
| Updated in the last week | 309 | 252 | -18% |
| Updated in the last month | 759 | 639 | -16% |
| Repos with >100 stars | 75 | 111 | +48% |
| Packages in the index | 1301 | 1695 | +30% |
| Package authors | 569 | 724 | +27% |
| Subscribers on r/elm | 6145 | 7730 | +26% |
| Users on Elm Discourse | 653 | 1672 | +156% |
Most of the metrics have increased, with the exception of activity on packages (I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from that). In particular, a lot of people have discovered Elm Discourse in the last year.
Interestingly, the number of GitHub repos, GitHub users, package count and package author count have all increased in lockstep by ~30%.
With regard to people counts, we have to keep in mind that these can include people who were previously active, so the growth in those numbers doesn’t necessarily show that the current pool of active Elm developers has grown, but it does show that new people keep getting involved in the Elm community at least for some time.
Overall, these numbers seem to indicate that the community is growing steadily.
By the way, if you would like to explore Elm packages, check out my Elm Package Catalog.
