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Nim 1.0

nim-lang.org

121–130 of 308 posts

Re: Nim 1.0

#121
I love seeing new languages that do interesting things. I wish I could see what languages everyone will be using in 100 years. Or at least I'm curious what we'd see with 100 years of development towards solving today's problems (and without AI because that's not what this particular fantasy of mine is about).

It's one of my favorite things to fantasize about when I run into another python bug or a write a tedious unit test that feels like I should be able to let my tools deal with for me. Super-future-dependent-haskell's type system with python's ergonomics, and fantasy-future-python's gradual typing to go fast and loose when I feel like it, and C's ability to specify exactly what I want when I need to with rust's ability to keep me from shooting myself in the foot while doing so, and zig's ability to do dead-simple compile time programming, and super-future-idris/coq's ability to write ergonomic proofs in place of many tests, and so on. Or even the futuristic fantasy one-FFI-to-rule-them-all, so I can mix and match pieces super smoothly.

Every time I see an interesting new language catching on, I can't help but engage in optimistic flights of fancy about the future of programming.

Re: Nim 1.0

#122

I love seeing new languages that do interesting things. I wish I could see what languages everyone will be using in 100 years. Or at least I'm curious what we'd see with 100 years of development towards solving today's problems (and without AI because that's not what this particular fantasy of mine is about). It's one of my favorite things to fantasize about when I run into another python bug or a write a tedious uni…

Many of these features sound like Julialang to me.. Not certain how well they fit with Nim.

In fact, I almost suspect you are hinting in that direction yourself ;)

Re: Nim 1.0

#123

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

At first blush, it's easy to describe Nim as C-flavored Python, but I'm not sure that quite captures it. The syntax is similar, but that's about where the similarities end - Python is deeply, fundamentally a dynamic language, and Nim one of the more firmly statically typed non-functional languages out there. You could also describe it as being competitive with Rust, but with more compromises for the sake of developer…

We already got a Java-killer: Kotlin

Re: Nim 1.0

#124
I have been considering approaching a new language lately after have self learn python and more recently javascript.

Where does nim sit in regards to the future of machine learning? Can we expect clones of pytorch/tensorflow? Is it a suitable language for this?

Re: Nim 1.0

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. The fact that a language compiles down to C doesn't mean it compiles down to efficient C. At the simplest level, the compiled code could add a bunch of unnecessary function calls and pointers and other forms of indirection that wouldn't be present in hand-written C. But for a more extreme example, you could also compile an interpreter or VM to C, and it would still be much slower than the eq…

> The fact that a language compiles down to C doesn't mean it compiles down to efficient C. Where do you see me claiming otherwise? > At the simplest level, the compiled code could add a bunch of unnecessary function calls and pointers and other forms of indirection that wouldn't be present in hand-written C. Again, why are you telling me this? Please quote where I claimed otherwise. > But for a more extreme example,…

But that's not at all a useful way to describe a language. Why would someone ever describe a language as "as fast as C" and not mean "as fast as typical hand-written C"? What would be the purpose of that? With your interpretation, CPython is "as fast as C", since it's written in C, and yet that's not a claim anyone would actually make.

Re: Nim 1.0

#126
post #122

I love seeing new languages that do interesting things. I wish I could see what languages everyone will be using in 100 years. Or at least I'm curious what we'd see with 100 years of development towards solving today's problems (and without AI because that's not what this particular fantasy of mine is about). It's one of my favorite things to fantasize about when I run into another python bug or a write a tedious uni…

Many of these features sound like Julialang to me.. Not certain how well they fit with Nim. In fact, I almost suspect you are hinting in that direction yourself ;)

Let's not call it that.

Re: Nim 1.0

#127

I have been considering approaching a new language lately after have self learn python and more recently javascript. Where does nim sit in regards to the future of machine learning? Can we expect clones of pytorch/tensorflow? Is it a suitable language for this?

> Where does nim sit in regards to the future of machine learning? Can we expect clones of pytorch/tensorflow?

https://github.com/fragcolor-xyz/nimtorch

Re: Nim 1.0

#128
post #8

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…

"V" would also fit into that list I think.

https://vlang.io/

Re: Nim 1.0

#129
post #86

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

I'm from Status, Nim's main sponsor and a blockchain company that is doing Ethereum 2.0 research and implementation in Nim. Nim had the following appeal for us: - Ethereum research is done in Python, we actually started our code with a tool called py2nim to convert a 50k lines Python codebase to Nim in less than a month (and remove cruft for 3 months but that's another story). - Nim allows us to use a single language…

> ...something impossible in C++

    vec[3_s & 4] 
is very much possible in C++. It's only two characters longer.

(C++ doesn't have a ':' operator, you'll need to use some other symbol.)

Re: Nim 1.0

#130

I have been considering approaching a new language lately after have self learn python and more recently javascript. Where does nim sit in regards to the future of machine learning? Can we expect clones of pytorch/tensorflow? Is it a suitable language for this?

> Where does nim sit in regards to the future of machine learning? Can we expect clones of pytorch/tensorflow? https://github.com/fragcolor-xyz/nimtorch

Cheers. No harm in checking it out. That Manning book looks good.
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