GoKawiilHologram Works. Sponsor What Comes Next.
Hologram works. Elixir runs in the browser today - four feature releases this year, most of the standard library working client-side, a full realtime layer, JavaScript interop, and the first applications running in production.
New to Hologram? My ElixirConf EU 2025 talk is the introduction to what it is and why it exists.
What comes next is bigger than any of it. Local-first: applications that keep working offline and sync automatically when the connection returns, built into the framework instead of assembled by hand from three libraries and a lot of hope. No full-stack framework in any language ecosystem ships this. Hologram is close enough to be the first.
Whether that gets built comes down to the next few months, and to whether companies decide to put weight behind it. I'd rather say that plainly now than have it show up later as a project that quietly slowed down.
Here's where things stand, and how you or the company you work for can help.
What sponsorship built
Eight months ago I wrote that I was at a crossroads, splitting 60+ hour weeks between contract work and the framework. The community answered. Curiosum came on board as Main Sponsor, the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation funded a set of development milestones, and individual sponsors signed up on GitHub.
Four public feature releases came out of it, v0.7 through v0.10 - with v0.11 landing now.
v0.7 Elixir's standard library in the browser Elixir's stdlib calls Erlang functions underneath, so running it client-side meant porting those functions. A community initiative took client-side coverage from a fraction of the standard library to nearly all of it - 150 Erlang functions ported by 49 contributors, most of them making their first contribution to a BEAM project. The release that concluded it hit the Hacker News front page at 107 points. v0.8 JavaScript interop Import npm packages, call Web APIs, use Web Components, and await JavaScript promises as Elixir Tasks. A VS Code extension shipped alongside it. v0.9 Hologram Realtime This grew well past its original scope. What began as server-triggered actions became a full realtime layer - pub/sub fan-out, think Phoenix Channels, but built fresh for Hologram and tailored end to end for developer experience. v0.10 Events and middleware A much-expanded client-side event system and a server-side middleware layer, plus client-side error handling with full try/rescue/catch/after/else in the browser, and comprehension parity. v0.11 Regular expressions and client error stacktraces landing now Elixir's PCRE-based regexes compiled for Hologram's client runtime, with =~ and the rest of the Regex functions, plus client-side error messages and stacktraces that match the server for easier debugging.
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