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Question (genuine, not trolling): what's the use-case for Nim regarding other languages? What are its pros/cons?
The cons are its lack of enterprise backing, its smaller community and its syntax, if you don't like either Pascal or Python.
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.
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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…
But that doesn't at all follow from compiling to C. I gave one example above; here's another. Perhaps my programming language has arbitrary-length integers and the C code it produces for a simple loop looks something like this:
bignum_t i = bignum_from_int(0);
bignum_t x = bignum_from_int(0);
while (i Question (genuine, not trolling): what's the use-case for Nim regarding other languages? What are its pros/cons?
- "Transpiled" to C, with some options regarding runtime library, which means you can target any uController out there
- Good metaprogramming support
- Static and _strong_ typing
- Consequently, precise type aware function dispatch
- Type inference
- Good generics
Also, more stuff like covariants and contravariants and... maybe you just have a look-see? ;-)
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"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.
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 fa…
Congratulations Nim team! :D I've had Nim installed on my laptop for a long time and I've always enjoyed tinkering around with it over the years. Maybe now it's time to find a bigger project to try it out on. This is a tiny thing, but just to highlight something unique I like about Nim, using `func` to declare pure functions (and `proc` for others) has been a small, but really nice quality of life improvement. It's s…
I'm using a weak-CPU machine these days, and it turns out that everything is slow and cpu-hungry except native code and Lua. Lua blows even JS out. Specifically, my scripts seem to be done faster than Node.js spins up.
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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…