Glimpse

A library for parsing, loading, and typechecking a complete Gleam project. It wraps the AST produced by glance with:

• a representation of a whole program — multiple interdependent modules — rather than a single module.
• typechecking both within and between modules.

Glimpse is not filesystem-aware: modules are loaded externally through a loader function. It mirrors the official Gleam compiler’s behavior closely; it has been validated with differential mutation testing against the real compiler across a wide range of popular Gleam projects.

Glimpse 1.0.0-rc.1 is available on hex.pm.

Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/glimpse/ Repo: https://github.com/dusty-phillips/glimpse

Install

gleam add glimpse

Quickstart

Load a package, then typecheck it for the Erlang target:

import gleam/io
import gleam/result
import glimpse
import glimpse/target
import glimpse/typecheck

fn load_module(module_name: String) -> Result(String, Nil) {
  // read the module contents from the filesystem here
  Ok("<contents of " <> module_name <> ".gleam>")
}

pub fn main() {
  let package =
    glimpse.load_package("my_package", load_module)
    |> result.map(typecheck.package(_, target.Erlang))

  case package {
    Ok(_) -> io.println("typechecked ok")
    Error(_) -> io.println("typecheck failed")
  }
}

The package is loaded with a loader function and returned with inferred types filled in; you can then iterate the modules and inspect the resolved AST.

Loading packages

glimpse.load_package accepts the package name and a function that takes a module name and returns that module’s contents. The loader is called with the main module (the package name) and, recursively, for every module that is imported:

pub fn load_glimpse_package(
  project: project.Project,
) -> Result(glimpse.Package, errors.Error) {
  glimpse.load_package(project.name, fn(module_name) {
    let path =
      filepath.join(project.build_src_dir(project), module_name <> ".gleam")
    filesystem.read(path)
  })
  |> result.map_error(fn(error) {
    case error {
      glimpse.LoadError(error) -> error
      glimpse.ParseError(glance_error, name, content) ->
        errors.GlanceParseError(glance_error, name, content)
    }
  })
}

Typechecking

Glimpse is a full Hindley-Milner type checker with exhaustiveness checking, across module boundaries. typecheck.package sorts the modules by their dependencies and checks each in turn, returning the package with inferred types filled in:

pub fn package(
  package: glimpse.Package,
  target: target.Target,
) -> Result(glimpse.Package, error.GlimpseError(a))

Targets

@target(erlang) / @target(javascript) definitions that are not active for the target being checked are filtered out before typechecking, mirroring the real compiler. Pass target.Erlang or target.Javascript. Experimental backends can use target.Named(name) so a @target(python) definition is active when checking for target.Named("python"); the same matching applies to @external(...) annotations.

Lower-level entry points

glimpse/typecheck also checks a single module, constant, or function against an existing type environment:

• module(glimpse_module, module_envs, target) — typechecks one module; any modules it imports must already have been checked.
• constant(environment, constant) — typechecks a module constant.
• function(environment, function) — typechecks a function body.

Errors

Functions return a Result, with errors reported as glimpse/error’s GlimpseError:

• LoadError — a module failed to load.
• ParseError — a module failed to parse.
• ImportError — a missing import, a circular dependency, or a source module importing a development dependency.
• TypeCheckError — an error in the code being checked, such as a type mismatch, unknown custom type, or invalid argument.

Because Glimpse is not filesystem-aware, it cannot discover dev-only modules on its own. Set Package.dev_dependencies to those module names after loading so that a source module importing one is reported as an ImportError, mirroring the real compiler’s src/dev split.

Development

The repo ships two dev tools in dev/. Pass their arguments after a -- separator:

gleam test                                # Run the unit tests
gleam run -m dev_check                    # Typecheck glimpse against itself
gleam run -m dev_check -- --typecheck <root>
gleam run -m mutate_check -- --root <root> --src <src_rel> [--jobs <n>] [--kind <kind>] [--count] [--both] [--resume]

• dev_check typechecks a project checkout with its build/packages/ dependencies, or (with no arguments) glimpse against itself.
• mutate_check is a differential mutation harness: it rewrites small pieces of a source module and judges each mutant against the real gleam check (ground truth) and glimpse, reporting false negatives (glimpse accepts what the real compiler rejects) and false positives. Verdicts are appended to durable files under /tmp/mutcheck/ as they are judged, so interrupted runs can continue with --resume. Do not run two sweeps against the same root concurrently; different roots in parallel are fine.