51–60 of 169 posts
Is there anyone using Nim either in side projects or in production that can comment on how they like it? I keep hearing about Nim and it sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I have the mental capacity right now to do a deep dive into the language and build something with it. I'd like to at some point soon though.
I use Nim in production. I been using it for more than 1 year in production. I like it. For me, it started out as a faster python that prevents typos. But it has really grown on me. I really like that I can share libs on server (compiling to c) and client side (compiling to plain javascript). Basically any C library is also a Nim library with a tiny wrapper. That's a huge ecosystem! I also like how Nim can integrate…
You know the language has potential when the top comments on HN are all about syntax. To generate more talking points, somebody ought to write an inverse of dumpLisp: https://nim-lang.org/docs/macros.html#dumpLisp.m%2Cuntyped
In my honest opinion, discussion on syntax is a distraction. One of the reasons I like Lisp/Clojure is that there is very little syntax. I can just focus on my problem and writing good code.
One thing I find annoying about Nim is the case insensitivity [0]. There was no strong reason for this "feature" and literally no mainstream language does it. Moreover it makes code search a pain. [0] https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#lexical-analysis-ident...
VB.net is case-insensitive, and probably more popular than you think[1]. I think that case insensitivity actually does make sense when working with symbolic identifiers. I've seen justifications for "Foo" and "foo" being distinct symbols; personally, I find that playing with casing like that reduces my ability to read code quickly. Case insensitivity does have its downsides, but usually it's not as noticeable in VB.n…
Looks cool already but is it easy to cross-compile? I can copy a Python script from my Linux machine and run it on both Mac and Windows PCs. Can Nim build executables for other platforms nearly as easy?
How do data scientists feel about Nim? It feels very pythony, but way faster - could be a really cool language for them, similar to what Julia is trying to be. Curious if anyone in a DS role has tried it out. I'm certainly tempted to try it out, I'm sure I'm losing lots of performance in parts of my analytics pipeline due to Python being garbage slow.
How do data scientists feel about Nim? It feels very pythony, but way faster - could be a really cool language for them, similar to what Julia is trying to be. Curious if anyone in a DS role has tried it out. I'm certainly tempted to try it out, I'm sure I'm losing lots of performance in parts of my analytics pipeline due to Python being garbage slow.
The options in python to speed up your code are vast without really having to do much, on a fundamental level. My outdated experience with Nimrod told me that it was a tad too opinionated E.g. Everything is a string in dbs is mentioned in the article. It was an interesting language, for me it felt like a stepping stone to something better. But the docs were really bad,
Is Nim stable? I have vague memories that some parts of its runtime had some deep issues that weren't yet resolved, like maybe around concurrency? I see the language is at 1.0 now, does it have a stable, solid, dependable implementation and runtime?
I also want to point out that Nim does have an IRC channel (#nim) on freenode, which was helpful for understanding some of these things.
What're compile times like?
It feels faster than Go, but I think part of that is down to Nim's compile output being verbose by default.