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Nim 1.0

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim 1.0

#71

Post by detaro »

19ylram49 wrote: post #64
gjm11 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it uses C as a compilation target doesn't have much to do with whether it's as fast as C in practice. It's easy to imagine a compiler that generates C but generates terrible C that runs really slowly. (E.g., imagine it goes via some sort of stack-machine intermediate representation, and variables in the source language turn into things like stack[25] in the compiled code.) Or consider: Every native-comp…

I’m not sure that I understand your argument. If the code from which the resulting machine code is compiled is C, then it’s objectively “as fast as C” … because, at the end of the day, it actually is C. Being “as fast as C” means that your resulting program will perform as fast as a C compiler [worth its salt] can get you. Your comparison to machine code (or human readable assembly code) is less useful in that such a…

"As fast as C" would commonly be interpreted as "a program written in it will be as fast as a well-written C equivalent", not as "there is a C program with the same performance characteristics".

That a language is compiled to C does not mean that its compiler is going to be able to produce a C program that's as good as a that well-written C equivalent. (A relatively obvious example would be a compiler that introduces a heavy runtime, and doesn't give the C compiler enough information for it to get rid of the runtime)

It's the same with assembly code: that a compiler produces assembly does not mean the resulting program is fast.

Re: Nim 1.0

#72

Post by Tiberium »

daemon_beard wrote: post #63
PMunch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick, but it actually compiles down to C. Nim works at a higher abstraction and the compilation is a one-way street. But what is more important is that it generates efficient C code, it looks ugly, and it's not something you would ever dream of writing yourself, but it's been optimised to give fast run-times. Often times in benchmarks the Nim code with optimisations comes out as fast as the C code with optimisatio…

Since you seem to know how this works -- I hope you won't mind if I ask you a slightly on-topic question about this... I've been trying to find out if I can take the generated C code that nim produces and, for example, compile it on some exotic architecture (say an ancient solaris/sparc system or some aix/power thing, or some mips microcontroller with linux) however I can't find any examples of people doing this... I…

Are you sure your OS/CPU is not on this list? :) https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/devel/lib/system/platfo... And yes, compiler works on almost all of them (you can see which ones are precompiled in csources - https://github.com/nim-lang/csources/blob/master/build.sh#L7... )

And for CPUs - https://github.com/nim-lang/csources/blob/master/build.sh#L1...

Re: Nim 1.0

#73

Post by vasili111 »

danielecook wrote: post #48
nfrankel wrote: post #20

Question (genuine, not trolling): what's the use-case for Nim regarding other languages? What are its pros/cons?

I stumbled onto nim because a sequencing-data (DNA/RNA/etc) library was written for it ( https://github.com/brentp/hts-nim ). In addition to Go, it's been a great way to learn a compiled language. It's fast, easy to use, and has a friendly community.

How good is nim performance with sequencing-data in comparision with other programming languages you used for it before?

Re: Nim 1.0

#74

Post by simplify »

19ylram49 wrote: post #27
nfrankel wrote: post #20

Question (genuine, not trolling): what's the use-case for Nim regarding other languages? What are its pros/cons?

Those are valid questions when evaluating an unknown technology. How could anyone consider this trolling? Not to digress but have we become too sensitive?

Unfortunately, asking questions on the internet is often seen as "opposing" or "arguing against" the thing you're asking about. So many qualify their statements to avoid this sort of misreading.

Re: Nim 1.0

#75

Post by gtycomb »

nfrankel wrote: post #20

Question (genuine, not trolling): what's the use-case for Nim regarding other languages? What are its pros/cons?

When I started an enterprise data project with a small team where Python was the familar workhorse we stopped for moment initially to think of ways to improve performance. Cython was the familiar route with Python but we started building small prototyes in Rust, Go, and Nim. Beyond the basics our progress slowed down with Rust and Go (yes, I know Go is very easy for some) but Nim allowed us to put together a fully fairly complex application in short time. Just one book, 'Nim in Action', gave us all the ropes, every example in it worked (thanks Dominic), and some of our key integrations such as Postgresl Client drivers, built-in web UI (Jester) framework, Json processin, Nim's build/packaging support, generics, fast static typechecking, etc were exceptionally robust (for this young a language) and worked in an intutive way for us ... we reached production rather smoothly.

Re: Nim 1.0

#76

Post by ptx »

perturbation wrote: post #4

Congrats guys!!! This has been much-anticipated and I'm very excited. I personally wish that the owned reference stuff ( https://nim-lang.org/araq/ownedrefs.html ) had been part of 1.0, but I think that at some point shipping 1.0 >> everything else. I've been following (and evangelizing) Nim for a while, this will make it easier to do so.

I don't quite understand the definition of "memory safety" in that document. If deallocation can cause other objects to end up pointing to the wrong thing and the wrong data, how is that different from memory corruption?

If your filesystem suddenly starts returning the contents of notepad.exe when asked for user32.dll and vice versa, is that not filesystem corruption?

If an admin user object can suddenly start pointing to the guest user object and still be considered "memory safe", that doesn't seem like a very safe definition of safety.

Re: Nim 1.0

#77

Post by mratsim »

19ylram49 wrote: post #64
gjm11 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it uses C as a compilation target doesn't have much to do with whether it's as fast as C in practice. It's easy to imagine a compiler that generates C but generates terrible C that runs really slowly. (E.g., imagine it goes via some sort of stack-machine intermediate representation, and variables in the source language turn into things like stack[25] in the compiled code.) Or consider: Every native-comp…

I’m not sure that I understand your argument. If the code from which the resulting machine code is compiled is C, then it’s objectively “as fast as C” … because, at the end of the day, it actually is C. Being “as fast as C” means that your resulting program will perform as fast as a C compiler [worth its salt] can get you. Your comparison to machine code (or human readable assembly code) is less useful in that such a…

JVM, CLR, Python bytecode or Lua JIT code are ultimately all transformed into machine code but those are not as fast as assembler.

Being as fast as C is not about using C as an intermediate language but having data structures and control flow that resemble what C compiler have been optimized for.

Case in point, Haskell GHC is capable of outputting C code but the algorithm will not get C performance (or Haskell performance without this intermediate C representation).

Re: Nim 1.0

#78

Post by 19ylram49 »

detaro wrote: post #71
19ylram49 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure that I understand your argument. If the code from which the resulting machine code is compiled is C, then it’s objectively “as fast as C” … because, at the end of the day, it actually is C. Being “as fast as C” means that your resulting program will perform as fast as a C compiler [worth its salt] can get you. Your comparison to machine code (or human readable assembly code) is less useful in that such a…

"As fast as C" would commonly be interpreted as "a program written in it will be as fast as a well-written C equivalent", not as "there is a C program with the same performance characteristics". That a language is compiled to C does not mean that its compiler is going to be able to produce a C program that's as good as a that well-written C equivalent. (A relatively obvious example would be a compiler that introduces…

> "As fast as C" would commonly be interpreted as "a program written in it will be as fast as a well-written C equivalent"

That’s your interpretation, which is fine, but the objective meaning stands. Even the idea of “well-written C” is, in my experience, fairly subjective amongst C programmers.

Re: Nim 1.0

#79

Post by [deleted] »

nobleach wrote: post #68
TylerE wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Elixir is certainly a member of list of languages people are considering bailing out of Python for.

That's so interesting. I absolutely love Elixir, but I just never saw it as a replacement for Python. (Which I hold in high regards as well) Perhaps it's only my experience with both langs. Elixir I used for JSON API type things, while Python I used for all types of general purpose stuff. Both are great, but Python is super popular with the science crowd (I used it for GIS/Geoprocessing tasks). Maybe Elixir has simil…

[deleted]

Re: Nim 1.0

#80

Post by asdf21 »

danielecook wrote: post #51
nfrankel wrote: post #20

Question (genuine, not trolling): what's the use-case for Nim regarding other languages? What are its pros/cons?

I've used it to develop command-line based utilities. The binaries tend to be small and fast.

Are any of these open source? Would love to check them out.
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