Hologram Works. Sponsor What Comes Next. - Hologram
Hologram 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.
And beyond the releases themselves: first-class AI assistant support - llms.txt, usage_rules compatibility, and per-project agent docs, so tools like Claude Code and Cursor write idiomatic Hologram instead of falling back on LiveView patterns.
The numbers moved with the work:
1,400+
GitHub Stars, up 40%+ since November's funding campaign
📦
3×
Hex downloads since November's funding campaign, still accelerating
📬
350+
Monthly newsletter subscribers
👥
49
Contributors in the porting initiative
Ecosystem: other developers have started building tooling on top of Hologram, from devtools and IDE support to a testing framework built specifically for it
Coverage: nine Thinking Elixir episodes over 18 months, a BEAM There Done That episode with Francesco Cesarini and Allen Wyma publishing this week, plus Elixir Radar, Elixir Weekly and Awesome Elixir carrying every release
So what changed? In January I wrote that Hologram had found sustainable funding. What I didn't spell out at the time is how the pieces fit: the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation's support came as an agreed program of four development milestones , each one a defined deliverable, not an open-ended arrangement. Three have been delivered and the fourth is finishing now, with its last piece shipping in v0.11. That program did exactly what it was designed to do, and it's reaching its end.
That isn't the Foundation stepping back. We're working together on a second round, and support earmarked for Hologram by companies through the EEF is what makes it possible - more on that below.
Curiosum continues as Main Sponsor, and individual sponsors are still here. Nothing fell through. What changed is that the roadmap ahead is more ambitious than everything behind it, and the first round of milestone funding covered exactly the stretch it was designed to cover.
Who is behind this
👑
José Valim
Creator of Elixir
Promoted the porting initiative, shares releases
📰
elixir-lang.org
José Valim & Wojtek Mach
Featured Hologram
🧡
Zach Daniel
Ash Framework Creator
Ongoing sponsor
Oban
Elixir background jobs
Ongoing sponsor
Moss...