Rust has a specific enemy/friend. The borrow checker. People wanna check out what is that legendary beast. Nim is just a reasonable and "bag of assorted stuff" language, like Python.
Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
21–30 of 139 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#22Indentation sensitivity is ugly.
With a bracket, i can easily read the scopes, block of codes. With indentation, it's harder.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#23You need a killer feature to gain ground on those traditional, well-established languages in the industry. Only marginally better is not enough for people to invest so much as to introduce a new language in a serious company. This killer feature needs to provide really clear advantage so that a risk-benefit analysis can show that even introduce this new language is a significant undertaking, it is still worth it. For Rust, this killer feature is memory safety comparing to other bare metal high performance languages like C and C++. For comparison, D is a decent improvement to C++, but it is still not enough for people to switch in large scale in the industry, because it does not have that killer feature to stand out.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#24Rust has the elevator pitch down: C but memory safe. "very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc" is not a good elevator pitch. Its a little bit of everything with no clear focus point. So I'd say rust had better marketing.
How about the motto: “Efficient, Expressive, Elegant”?
I don't think that is particularly good either. It is too vauge. Just subjective adjectives. Nothing concrete.
Not to mention, everyone aims for those traits. It is not unique enough.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#25Rust has the elevator pitch down: C but memory safe. "very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc" is not a good elevator pitch. Its a little bit of everything with no clear focus point. So I'd say rust had better marketing.
Pitch: Like Python, but faster and multicore. At least it's the reason I tried it once. It was not a bad experience.
That is definitely a decent pitch. I think if nim oriented itself around that pitch more it would do better.
However i do wonder how big the market is for "python, but faster and multicore". I suspect it is smaller than "c but safe".
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#26If someone asked me to describe what Nim is and what it's good at without looking at their promotional materials I couldn't tell you.
Even though I have never used Rust in any significant capacity (tried to do Advent of Code with it, gave up on the first task) I can still tell you what Rust is good at.
I can do the same for C, C++, Java/Typescript, Go, C#, Java etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#27Rust had Mozilla's backing, and later other behemoths like Amazon and Microsoft jumped onto the bandwagon. Corporate support is absolutely essential for a new language to be taken seriously in the industry. If Go weren't associated with Google, people would have laughed that language out of the room long ago. Likewise, it's difficult to imagine TypeScript ever catching on if it didn't have Microsoft's might behind it…
While I agree that corporate support plays a huge role with market share and acceptance, I disagree that Go would have been laughed out of the room. Very likely that a language made by Griesemer, Pike, and Thompson would have got lots of attention. Arguably enough to catch on anyway. These men are already famous, in programming circles. Case in point, look at Jai, with just the star power of Jonathan Blow and how wel…
I think the issue is that it's hard to trust the language to go over its current limitations without commercial backing.
This is especially true for a language like Go which had limited functionality and a complete lack of tooling (eg. no package manager, no generics) for a long time.
I didn't pick up Rust until a few killer projects were released. Before that async was a complete mess. For a long time we didn't have the ? operator.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#28Rust has the elevator pitch down: C but memory safe. "very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc" is not a good elevator pitch. Its a little bit of everything with no clear focus point. So I'd say rust had better marketing.
Pitch: Like Python, but faster and multicore. At least it's the reason I tried it once. It was not a bad experience.
The problem with that for me is "like Python" implies a HUGE collection of libraries I can use to connect to pretty much anything.
With Python I can just search "python " and find popular, well-maintained, libraries to do . I can't do that with Nim. Most of the stuff I find seems to be 5-9 years old and have no updates since.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#29Because language is one thing and community is another thing. I have the same feeling about Crystal.
I have no idea what Crystal is either :D
Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?
#30Rust has the elevator pitch down: C but memory safe. "very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc" is not a good elevator pitch. Its a little bit of everything with no clear focus point. So I'd say rust had better marketing.
Sorry to be a pedant but it's likely more like: "C++, but memory safe".