Nim Programming Language 0.14.0 released

Curious, if you don't mind... where do you work that you get to use Nim?

Aside from using GCC's debugging information, you can emit code that creates its own debugging information in some run-time structure.

For example, at the beginning of each function call, you insert a function call that pushes a new stack frame into some global stack, and store the function's arguments. Then, just before every return from the function, you pop the stack frame. When the program crashes, you write the stack to a JSON file, and use a language-specific debugger to view it.

There are several languages similar to Nim these days, and they're all very exciting. For example, Nim, Rust, D, Go, and probably others I'm forgetting. Does anyone know of some chart that compares them based on their features and priorities? Maybe something in the spirit of https://mobile.twitter.com/nixcraft/status/73938379662612889... but with more areas of comparison and less trying to be funny?

This reminded me of the recent brilliant talk about design of Julia: "Julia: to lisp or not to lisp?" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3zRXhrFZY

I'll try to give it a go for Rust, Nim, and Go.

Rust: Wants to replace C++ as an expressive systems programming language. Syntax derived from C++. Emphasis on const correctness. Makes use of some functional programming concepts. Extensive metaprogramming. No garbage collection by default. Interface based polymorphism. The type system tracks memory ownership helping to prevent some classes of error at the cost of more cognitive overhead. The standard library is also written in a way that makes it hard to break things. The only one of the three that can easily be used to write libraries that can be called from other programming languages. Medium complexity to learn.

Nim: Slightly higher level than Rust. Reference counting garbage collection which can be turned off, but heaps are by default local to threads. Syntax derived from python. Emphasis on const correctness. Extensive compile time evaluation facilities. Object oriented polymorphism (for now). Sadly allows null by default for now. Extensive metaprogramming. Medium complexity to learn.

Go: Hightest level of the three. Traditional garbage collector. Interface based polymorphism. Simple and easy to pick up.

All three have good stories about multithreading. All three do their best to fix warts in C++ in things like declaration mirrors use syntax. All three start with the chainsaw turned off so you won't cut off your foot unless you're doing something genuinely dangerous like writing an OS or compiler.

For me, I'd use Rust for writing security critical or OS level things like kernels, system libraries, important utilities, and web browsers. Nim for small team applications where you can afford to be a bit clever and Go for large team projects where cleverness has to be discouraged.

I'm not a huge expert in any of these so there's probably important things I'm overlooking.