Ask HN: Does anyone use Nim language in production?

How mature is the standard library? How abundant are third party libraries?

> How has your experience been compared to your previous tech?

Previous to using Nim I was primarily using Python. This was a few years ago now, but recently I was working on a project in Python and found myself yearning for Nim. There were multiple reasons for this, but what stuck with me was how much I missed static typing. The Python project used type hints which I found rather awkward to use (of course the fact that we didn't enforce their use didn't help, but it felt like such a half-baked solution). Dependencies very often required multiple guesses and searches through stack overflow to get working. And the resulting program was slow.

As far as I'm concerned, Nim is Python done right. It produces fast dependency-free binaries and has a strong type system with support for generics.

Of course, that isn't to say that Nim is a perfect language (but then what is). For example, JetBrains has done a brilliant job with PyCharm. Nim could use a good IDE like PyCharm and with its strong typing it has the potential to work even better.

> How mature is the standard library?

To be honest the standard library does need some work. In the next release we do plan on making some breaking changes, but we always lean on the side of keeping compatibility even though Nim is still pre-1.0. Of course, sometimes this is not possible.

> How abundant are third party libraries?

Not as abundant as I would like. Great news is that you can help change that :)

The Nimble package manager is still relatively new, but you can get a pretty good idea of the third party libraries available by looking at the package list repo[1].

Hope that helps. Please feel free to AMA, I'd love to introduce you to our community.

1 - https://github.com/nim-lang/packages/blob/master/packages.js...

Having used Python, Go, C, Perl, Java, Nim is a breeze to code in. Occasionally the compiler glitches and you have to delete nimcache. Very rarely it fails to compile something and you have to rewrite few lines differently. Not an issue. Build frequently to avoid any surprise.

> How mature is the standard library?

Not that much: it lacks examples and helper procedures that you would expect, yet I still feel more productive with Nim than other languages.

> How abundant are third party libraries?

Look at the packages. Most of the basic stuff it's there. For small and medium projects it's usually not an issue, occasionally I have to wrap functions from a C library.

If you are looking for big, fancy libraries like Pandas and Sklearn, they are just not there. Use Nim for tool and services instead.

I'm now using it extensively for a confidential computing and block chain project, which is quite exciting.