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

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

#71

Post by prirun »

IMO, if Nim's goal had been a compiled Python, with restrictions where necessary to ensure this was possible (can't add class members at runtime for example), it would be much more popular. I don't mean you could take Python code and compile it, but where design decisions needed to be made, they could have been more compatible with Python instead of choosing the "Nim's not Python so let's use a unique syntax or incompatible semantics" path.

They also need a new BDFL with some tact.

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

#72

Post by Shish2k »

For me: because rust installed correctly the first time, and rustup keeps it up to date correctly. Compared to Nim, where I tried three different installers, and all of them were broken in different ways; eventually I got one installer to work, but then I tried updating, and it stopped working…

It’s a pretty nice language when the tools work though :)

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

#73

Post by guenthert »

Tozen wrote: post #9
p-e-w wrote: post #3

Rust 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…

> In fact, would not bet against just Ken Thompson (by himself), creating a new language and whether or not it would catch on.

You mean like Limbo?

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

#74

Post by nektro »

Tozen wrote: post #9
p-e-w wrote: post #3

Rust 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…

jai is not well known and it being a language and closed source makes it a total non-starter

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

#75

Post by c_crank »

Tozen wrote: post #9
p-e-w wrote: post #3

Rust 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 don't think it would be so well regarded when considering the motivation that Rob Pike and Ken Thompson had for making the language the way they did.

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

#76

Post by c_crank »

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…

Rust doesn't guarantee memory safety.

I think anything that can generate a trivial hello world program that doesn't leak memory is better than V.

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

#77

Post by antifa »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #40
tompark wrote: post #19

The main reason IMO: Nim isn't really known for anything other than being a good general-purpose language. In that sense, it's sorta like Haxe lang. Other popular languages are T- or M-shaped generalists -- i.e. good enough as a general purpose language but also excelling at 1-3 specialties. You can use these languages for anything but in practice you use them in specific contexts. * If you're working on a game in Un…

This post nails it. > I think Mojo is going to hurt Nim adoption. Mojo is interesting. Python is a genuinely terrible language with an unparalleled library ecosystem. I hope something saves me from the tyranny of Python. But I'm not optimistic.

Mojo is not a programming language, it's a waitlist you can signup for.

Nim has the advantage of provably existing and being fully open source.

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

#79

Post by c_crank »

0atman wrote: post #61

Nim is too timid. Most languages are too timid. 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'…

Rust people talking about 'revolutions' love to ignore that memory safe languages without garbage collectors have been around for years. Ada+Spark, Cyclone, even D all made large steps forward in this area long before Rust was ever a thing.

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

#80

Post by steveklabnik »

bawolff wrote: post #38
dijit wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be a pedant but it's likely more like: "C++, but memory safe".

I feel like rust has been having a lot of success recently in areas that were previously dominated by c not c++, but i'm not that familar with the rust landscape so maybe i am mistaken.

No, you’re right. There’s just a crowd of people that go “Rust is more complex than C and C++ is more complex than C therefore Rust is more like C++ than C.”

Yet tons of people (like myself) who have preferred C to C++ still like Rust more. Categorization just isn’t that simple.

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