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

My context: I'm a maintainer of iNim, creator of the Rust channel, No Boilerplate, and a professional python web developer for 15 years.

The features you are excited about in Nim are compromised for the sake of simplicity:

- Macros can't change syntax,

- There's a limit to how real-time the standard language is,

- Compiling to javascript is a nice trick, but if it didn't rely on GC it could compile to webassembly, which is better,

- Ask any advanced python developer: Indentation for syntax is a bad idea at scale. Hell, have you ever used YAML?

What Rust does is a revolution because they solved the problem of memory safety without garbage collection with the Borrow Checker. The knock-on effects are GARGANTUAN.

This was a hard problem to solve, and it makes the language more complex to learn, but it unlocks all the language's superpowers. If you 'cheat' with a GC, you get nothing. Nim started its life, just as most languages did with a GC, and the efforts to keep the syntax the same while offering alternatives are greatly compromised. It's far easier to add GC/RC to a low-level language than it is to remove it from a high-level one, where the whole ecosystem relies upon this behvaviour.

Of COURSE I know about Nim's plugabble GC options. That doesn't impress me at all (though Araq's effort is to be commended). In Nim they are compiler options, in Rust they're libraries. The difference is vital. For example, at a per-variable level, I can choose to reference count with https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Arc.html if I so wish (I rarely need to because the borrow checker is magic).

If you want python, you can have it inside a Rust macro, sort of like this https://crates.io/crates/inline-python because rust macros CAN change syntax. With Macros and no GC, you can rebuild ANY FEATURE inside Rust, the floor of the abstraction is the metal, and the ceiling is the sky.

This is what Rust is all about: full power to the developer, no compromises. My video on this topic for those interested is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuMXWc0xrK0

I love both languages, but I can only see one language being the standard next 40 years, and demonstrably so can Linux, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Discord, and many others.

I'm not sure about this argument. If Mozilla had created and pushed Nim instead, would it be as popular as what they did for Rust? I'm sure the marketing department would have found some angles to push for Nim. Maybe it would have been memory management options or that its somewhat like a compiled version of Python. I'm sure corporate minds would have figured something out. So if we could see alternate dimensions, where Nim was under Mozilla, it might be nearly as popular.

As it is, some would argue that Rust is somewhat niche, reserved for cases where memory safety without a GC is both necessary and critical. Rust ranks 20th on the TIOBE index. While nothing to sneeze at, nobody knows if it will go higher on the charts or fall back down.

https://ziglang.org/zsf/

Big tech wants you to think that you're nothing without them, while in truth there are plenty of situations where small realities can absolutely out-compete them:

https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/

If you want a proxy variable to observe wrt Zig's growth, look at the star history on GitHub: we are today more popular than Rust was at our age.

https://star-history.com/#ziglang/zig&rust-lang/rust&Timelin...

...and in fact some big tech companies are jumping on the bandwagon, like Uber, but that's an after-the-fact thing.

https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...

> If Go weren't associated with Google, people would have laughed that language out of the room long ago.

Nah, Go gets right certain critical things, and that's why is popular. Being from Google doesn't guarantee anything, look at Dart for example.

https://kristoff.it/blog/why-go-and-not-rust/

I have a different algorithm:

- Find first indented line

- Find next unindented line

If that does not work for you, your code is bad.

Which does not say anything given Githubs growth and change in usage patterns from 2010 to today.

Rather, I would say Zig is lagging far behind Rust and it should have had multiples higher stars than Rust at the same time to be on "equal footing" given the multiples larger software community that exist today.