Elixir in the Browser: Bart Blast on Hologram
Show notes
What if instead of making your server smarter to handle the browser, you just ran your Elixir in the browser instead?
That's the bet Bart Blast has been making for six years - three of them full time. Hologram is a full-stack web framework that compiles Elixir to JavaScript and rebuilds the Erlang runtime in the browser: pattern matching engine, OTP guarantees, boxed types, all of it. No JavaScript to write. No round trip on every interaction. No inconsistent state between client and server.
This is the fourth episode in the podcast's ongoing series on where state should live - following Chris McCord on durable servers, Adi Iyengar on building a web framework, and Brooklyn Zelenka and Robert Virding on local-first. Bart made the opposite bet to Live View.
Topics include:
- why Bart spent six years building this instead of reaching for existing tools - and why the answer is "plain frustration"
- the latency ceiling you can't engineer past on the server, and why bandwidth improvements don't help
- how Hologram actually works: pulling the expanded AST from compiled BEAM files, normalizing it, lowering to an IR, and encoding to a JS runtime - including a real pattern matching engine and boxed types
- why Hologram doesn't merge front end and back end - there's still a clear separation, just one language crossing it
- actions vs. commands: the two behavior primitives and which side of the client/server boundary each lives on
- where Live View wins over Hologram - and Bart is honest about this (private logic, data-heavy apps, maturity)
- how Hologram compares to Luster (Gleam's equivalent) and why neither is competing with the other
- when you should not use Hologram yet
- where it's all heading: local-first sync layer, mobile, desktop, and eventually a single Elixir codebase for everything
Recorded June 18, 2026.
Resources mentioned:
- hologram.page
- hologram.page/newsletter
- GitHub: barb/hologram
- Discord: hologram community
- Hologram tag on Elixir Forum
- Website: https://hologram.page
- GitHub: https://github.com/bartblast/hologram
- Newsletter: https://hologram.page/newsletter
- Discord: https://discord.com/invite/huJWNuqt8J
- Elixir Forum: https://elixirforum.com/hologram
- X: https://x.com/Bart_Blast
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bartblast/
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bartblast.com
- Slack: https://elixir-lang.slack.com/channels/hologram