I’m delighted to announce the first pre-release of Formless 3! It’s a complete rewrite of the library, reducing the internals to just a single PureScript file. Along the way, it makes the library significantly more ergonomic and more powerful. It was a tough rewrite but I’m happy with the result!
Some things to check out:
- The source code is, of course, updated, and the README has a brand new tutorial.
- The demo site has been updated with several new examples
- The Formless 3 pull request contains the code changes and a description of what changed and why. The diff is hard to read, however, so I’d just pull up the PR description and the new source.
- The Real World Halogen migration PR from Formless 2 to Formless 3 demonstrates how you can rewrite existing forms written with Formless 2 into Formless 3.
If you’re a Formless user, I would love for you to try out the new library and provide feedback. The library is fresh in mind for me, which is an ideal time to write documentation, provide examples, and answer questions. Your feedback can help me make changes that improve the library for your use cases – including breaking changes – before making an official Formless 3 release and keeping things stable from then on. It even helps when folks just read the tutorial and point out what they find most confusing.
I know that these changes are significant, and that means that existing Formless users will have to put work into updating their code. It simply wasn’t possible to perform this rewrite without significant breaking changes. However, it will most likely be a few months before Formless 3 is stable, released, and in the package sets and there’s no upcoming breaking Halogen release, so Formless 2 will continue to work for a long time.
I hope y’all enjoy the rewrite!