Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 139 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#51

Post by sph »

afiori wrote: post #43
sph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to software engineering than just memory safety.

The question is not whether Nim is better than Rust, the questions are: Does a C++ developer have reasons to switch to Rust and Does a C++ developer have reasons to switch to Nim

Why switch? Is it that weird to know and use more than a language?

In case of adoption, both answers are yes, because Rust and Nim don't occupy the same niche. The reason why Nim has not caught like wildfire is that its niche is often shared with Python or Go, which have a much larger mind share.

Which is why asking this question from the memory safety point of view misses the mark.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#53

Post by xigoi »

iopq wrote: post #32

When Rust was able to get rid of a class of memory bugs, undefined behavior, concurrency bugs without a garbage collector, it achieved a breakthrough. You can now write JS or Java VM in a language that doesn't have buffer overflows, dangling pointers and all kinds of other nasty security vulnerabilities. Nim doesn't GUARANTEE memory safety, so it's basically... better Pascal? It's an iterative improvement that nobody…

Nim does guarantee memory safety if you don't use unsafe features like raw pointers.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#54

Post by xigoi »

theshrike79 wrote: post #28
carlmr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nim allows you to use libraries for C and C++, as well as Python with the NimPy library, so the situation is not that bad if you don't mind getting your hands dirty.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#55

Post by polotics »

iopq wrote: post #41
theshrike79 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except THAT library only supports Python 2.7.x

sorry what do you mean?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#56

Post by xigoi »

pull_my_finger wrote: post #35

I think instances where transpiled languages becoming more popular than their targets would be the exception not the rule. At the end of the day, you generally are advised to be proficient in the target language to use the transpiled language skillfully or to be able to effectively debug it, and if you're already proficient in the target language, you likely can just write the target language directly and have cleane…

Nim is not transpiled, and you don't need to know any C to effectively use Nim.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#58

Post by bawolff »

sph wrote: post #49
bawolff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but does nim have any breakthrough innovations in any of those other areas?

Do you need breakthrough innovations to adopt a language? Listen, I like Rust and it has its niche for some of my projects, but not all projects should be written in Rust. Least of all because it is an innovative language. That works well as a marketing slogan, not as a factor to decide which language is more apt for the project at hand. Do I need memory safety? If yes, Rust is the best choice. But other times I need…

> Do you need breakthrough innovations to adopt a language?

No, but the question wasn't "why has literally nobody on earth adopted nim?" (Which would obviously be false). The question was "why isn't it as popular as rust". There are thousands of languages out there. To be at the top of the pack, nim would have to really stand out somehow. Nim hasn't, so its a little bit niche somewhat mid-popularity language. Which is totally fine, not everything has to rule the world. However that is the reason why it is not ruling the world.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

#59

Post by xigoi »

revskill wrote: post #47
frodowtf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... you don't indent your bracket blocks?

Algorithm to read scope: - Step 1: Find open bracket - Step 2: Find closed bracket With indentation, the algorithm now becomes: - Step 1: Find something which seems to open a scope. - Step 2: Scan all indentation level until it's done. The difference is huge here.

Step 1: Find an indent increase.

Step 2: Find the first place where the indent becomes lower.

It's not hard, human vision is naturally designed for this. What is hard is finding a matching bracket when the code is not indented properly.

Post reply on HN