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A Programming Language Underdog

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Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#3

Post by dom96 »

cshenton wrote: post #2

Does nim have a concurrency story yet? That’s what gave me pause last time I checked it out.

Yep. Concurrency is achieved via async await. Parallelism via `spawn`.

Here is an example from my book that uses both: https://github.com/dom96/nim-in-action-code/blob/master/Chap...

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#5

Post by dom96 »

ducklingslicks wrote: post #4

I read the article. Still no idea what Nim is good for and why it's better than some other language.. and for which use cases?

This might sound strange but Nim is good for everything. From writing backend services to creating web apps running on the client side. I've built emulators, CLI apps, a full blown forum and much more in it.

It's particularly great for systems programming tasks that require high performance and zero dependencies. For example, Status is currently writing an Ethereum 2.0 sharding client for resource-restricted devices[1] in Nim.

Nim is also awesome if you've got an existing C or C++ codebase, the interop that Nim offers is one of the best (if not /the/ best), especially when it comes to C++ interop. As far as I'm concerned no other language can interoperate with C++ libraries as well as Nim can.

1 - https://github.com/status-im/nimbus

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#6

Post by sidstling »

ducklingslicks wrote: post #4

I read the article. Still no idea what Nim is good for and why it's better than some other language.. and for which use cases?

I read the article, and I’ve been spending the past 20 minutes looking at the SPA framework.

I’m still not sure what it is or why anyone would use it. It looks extremely complicated and verbose.

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#7

Post by iTokio »

dom96 wrote: post #5
ducklingslicks wrote: post #4

I read the article. Still no idea what Nim is good for and why it's better than some other language.. and for which use cases?

This might sound strange but Nim is good for everything. From writing backend services to creating web apps running on the client side. I've built emulators, CLI apps, a full blown forum and much more in it. It's particularly great for systems programming tasks that require high performance and zero dependencies. For example, Status is currently writing an Ethereum 2.0 sharding client for resource-restricted devices[…

What are Nim’s main weaknesses?

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#9

Post by sushidev »

dom96 wrote: post #5
ducklingslicks wrote: post #4

I read the article. Still no idea what Nim is good for and why it's better than some other language.. and for which use cases?

This might sound strange but Nim is good for everything. From writing backend services to creating web apps running on the client side. I've built emulators, CLI apps, a full blown forum and much more in it. It's particularly great for systems programming tasks that require high performance and zero dependencies. For example, Status is currently writing an Ethereum 2.0 sharding client for resource-restricted devices[…

How about the garbage collector? For really performance sensitive applications you'd turn it off and resort to manual memory management?

Re: A Programming Language Underdog

#10

Post by dom96 »

iTokio wrote: post #7
dom96 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might sound strange but Nim is good for everything. From writing backend services to creating web apps running on the client side. I've built emulators, CLI apps, a full blown forum and much more in it. It's particularly great for systems programming tasks that require high performance and zero dependencies. For example, Status is currently writing an Ethereum 2.0 sharding client for resource-restricted devices[…

What are Nim’s main weaknesses?

These affect people in different ways but off the top of my head:

- No Nim v1.0 yet, despite this we do our best to create a deprecation path for everything that's possible.

- No big company like Google/Apple supporting the language.

- Community is smaller than that of Go/Rust.

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