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Ray Tracing in Nim

nim-lang.org

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Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#31

Post by cercatrova »

hellofunk wrote: post #20
tastyminerals wrote: post #19

With all due respect, Nim is a great language performance wise however I fail to see how is it different from D. Many advertised features have been present in D for a long time. Syntax wise Nim it is a step back. It's hard to read and understand while any C/C++ dev will have next to no effort reading through D code. And of course while D is C ABI compliant it interoperates with C++ well too. I seriously doubt that Ni…

I agree that it is strange that, in all of the discussions surrounding relatively modern languages, and new technologies, while nim and rust and many others frequently get mentioned, so rarely it seems that anyone talks about D. Wonder why that is? I’m genuinely curious.

Here's a good overview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494490

Basically, D was too little, too late, with a lack of build tools, while Rust, Nim etc are designed from the beginning to have certain features and have easy to use build tools like cargo.

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#32

Post by tastyminerals »

hippyhippo wrote: post #29
tastyminerals wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the same person who attacked ppl on D forum. The nickname is familiar and the style ;) Chill. All languages have dusty corners and given the amount of ppl D has it's obvious that not all things are fixed in time but they were and they will, history already proved it. Besides, complaining is easier right?

> Are you the same person who attacked ppl on D forum Nope. I am the person who asked about dlang VS plugin and new ds module recently. I don't remember attacking anybody. > All languages have dusty corners and given the amount of ppl D has it's obvious that not all things are fixed in time but they were and they will, history already proved it. Well, it was you guys who asked why D is not discussed/used more. I just…

Ok. But going back to the issue. I live in Munich and know at least two big companies who use D in production and organize meetups. I have yet to see a single company that uses Nim.

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#33

Post by cercatrova »

entha_saava wrote: post #12
jswny wrote: post #8

I keep seeing Nim and it looks really productive and very interesting! Does anyone know how it compares to Zig?

Zig is mainly focused on low level programming - every function that allocates takes an allocator argument, there are lot of builtin functions to do low level bit twiddling, doesn't hide any control flow, etc.. Nim is mainly a productivity language. You have GC by default, extensive stdlib, lot of syntax sugar and metaprogramming features. You can create untraced pointers and do manual memory management. Thus, among…

Even though Rust has manual memory management, I'd say it can be pretty high level due to its functional programming features that are nearly equivalent to Haskell or OCaml.

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#34

Post by mratsim »

memexy wrote: post #14
ca_parody wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer probably has a lot of examples in it's implementation

Yup. That's what popped up when I searched. Thanks for the reference though.

The CUDA kernels are stored here:

- https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/tenso...

With the higher order function:

- https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/tenso...

And their code generation:

- https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/tenso...

It's possible to avoid inlining C++ like they do here:

- https://github.com/jcosborn/cudanim/blob/338be782/cuda.nim#L...

but I will explore that later.

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#35

Post by hippyhippo »

tastyminerals wrote: post #32
hippyhippo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you the same person who attacked ppl on D forum Nope. I am the person who asked about dlang VS plugin and new ds module recently. I don't remember attacking anybody. > All languages have dusty corners and given the amount of ppl D has it's obvious that not all things are fixed in time but they were and they will, history already proved it. Well, it was you guys who asked why D is not discussed/used more. I just…

Ok. But going back to the issue. I live in Munich and know at least two big companies who use D in production and organize meetups. I have yet to see a single company that uses Nim.

Well, mainly Status.im uses Nim, and there is one based in China I think (Some of their employees are regulars in the Nim gitter/irc/discord). Also, there is https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Companies-using-Nim , though I don't know how up to date it is. Anyhow, there is not much jobs for either nim/d/haxe/... So, they are mostly used for personal projects. I wanted to use D however it didn't work out, so onto other languages :(

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#36

Post by dmix »

pietroppeter wrote: post #28
tastyminerals wrote: post #19

With all due respect, Nim is a great language performance wise however I fail to see how is it different from D. Many advertised features have been present in D for a long time. Syntax wise Nim it is a step back. It's hard to read and understand while any C/C++ dev will have next to no effort reading through D code. And of course while D is C ABI compliant it interoperates with C++ well too. I seriously doubt that Ni…

* For a full comparison of features D vs Nim see [0], or a more succint selection of items by Nim's creator [1]; these also contains some remarks about metaprogramming and C/C++ interoperability. * syntax-wise you could also argue that is a step forward: it embraces Python syntax and it would be easy to read and understand for all Python devs. * Nim does have a "faster NumPy" by the same author of the article: [2] [0…

> it embraces Python syntax

Nim looks most like Pascal syntax to me, with a bit of Python

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#37

Post by mratsim »

tastyminerals wrote: post #32
hippyhippo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you the same person who attacked ppl on D forum Nope. I am the person who asked about dlang VS plugin and new ds module recently. I don't remember attacking anybody. > All languages have dusty corners and given the amount of ppl D has it's obvious that not all things are fixed in time but they were and they will, history already proved it. Well, it was you guys who asked why D is not discussed/used more. I just…

Ok. But going back to the issue. I live in Munich and know at least two big companies who use D in production and organize meetups. I have yet to see a single company that uses Nim.

The biggest sponsor of Nim Status:

- https://github.com/status-im?q=&type=&language=nim

It's used by Beamdog for tooling for Neverwinter Enhanced Editions:

- https://github.com/niv/neverwinter.nim

It's used in Academia at the University of Utah and in Germany:

- https://github.com/brentp

- https://github.com/Vindaar

And a couple more: trading, pharma

- https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Companies-using-Nim

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#38

Post by mratsim »

tastyminerals wrote: post #19

With all due respect, Nim is a great language performance wise however I fail to see how is it different from D. Many advertised features have been present in D for a long time. Syntax wise Nim it is a step back. It's hard to read and understand while any C/C++ dev will have next to no effort reading through D code. And of course while D is C ABI compliant it interoperates with C++ well too. I seriously doubt that Ni…

> Syntax wise Nim it is a step back. It's hard to read and understand while any C/C++ dev will have next to no effort reading through D code. And of course while D is C ABI compliant it interoperates with C++ well too.

On the other hand, people coming from Python, Ruby, Pascal, Ada will appreciate the minimal amount of sigils.

> I seriously doubt that Nim or any other language in this regard has better metaprogramming than D.

Can you write an Embedded DSL + compiler running at compile-time in D

- https://github.com/numforge/laser/tree/master/laser/lux_comp...

Can you write a cryptographic library with hex conversion to big integer and modular arithmetic running at compile-time in D?

- https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/master/constanti...

Can you generate a state machine that lowers down to optimized computed gotos with no dynamic allocation suitable for multithreading runtimes and embedded devices and able to display the actual graph at compiletime?

- https://github.com/mratsim/Synthesis

Can you describe x86 opcodes in a declarative way for a JIT assembler and do all the rex/modrm/sib computation at compile-time?

- https://github.com/mratsim/photon-jit/blob/master/photon_jit...

And the same thing for an emulator?

- https://github.com/mratsim/glyph/blob/master/glyph/snes/opco...

Can you implement async as a library?

Can you emulate classes with ADTs to solve the expression problem, avoid cache misses and multithreading problem due to OOP and the double indirection due to the visitor pattern?

- https://github.com/mratsim/trace-of-radiance/blob/master/tra...

> Nim might have a speed overhead in certain tasks but that depends on a benchmark. Besides, does Nim have anything similar to NumPy which is actually faster? D does.

It does:

- https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer

With CPU, OpenCL and Cuda backends (in differing state of maturity)

and it's being used for data analysis for example ancestry prediction:

- http://home.chpc.utah.edu/~u6000771/somalier-ancestry.html

You can even run a neural network and see its training live:

- https://github.com/Vindaar/NeuralNetworkLiveDemo

AFAIK D doesn't have any plotting library while Nim has plot.ly integration and a ggplot2 port in pure Nim:

- https://github.com/brentp/nim-plotly

- https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

And lastly nim can easily call Python:

- https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

or be called from Python:

- https://github.com/Pebaz/nimporter

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#39

Post by entha_saava »

cercatrova wrote: post #33
entha_saava wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig is mainly focused on low level programming - every function that allocates takes an allocator argument, there are lot of builtin functions to do low level bit twiddling, doesn't hide any control flow, etc.. Nim is mainly a productivity language. You have GC by default, extensive stdlib, lot of syntax sugar and metaprogramming features. You can create untraced pointers and do manual memory management. Thus, among…

Even though Rust has manual memory management, I'd say it can be pretty high level due to its functional programming features that are nearly equivalent to Haskell or OCaml.

True. But rust's aim (at least as its original author envisioned) is for low level systems programming where having automatic memory management is not desired. The aim of safety in low level programming is nice, but that comes with tradeoffs. Eg: not allowing certain patterns and thinking about memory / ownership even when not required.

Some vocal minority of rust fanboys herald it like these are not a problem and rust is right tradeoff for every programming task, as if when crab god doesn't like the way you structured your program there is fundamental mistakes in your programming and you should have fixed them anyway. That kind of dishonest, blanket statements are what leads to Rust Evangelism Strike Force memes.

Re: Ray Tracing in Nim

#40

Post by m4r35n357 »

hellofunk wrote: post #20
tastyminerals wrote: post #19

With all due respect, Nim is a great language performance wise however I fail to see how is it different from D. Many advertised features have been present in D for a long time. Syntax wise Nim it is a step back. It's hard to read and understand while any C/C++ dev will have next to no effort reading through D code. And of course while D is C ABI compliant it interoperates with C++ well too. I seriously doubt that Ni…

I agree that it is strange that, in all of the discussions surrounding relatively modern languages, and new technologies, while nim and rust and many others frequently get mentioned, so rarely it seems that anyone talks about D. Wonder why that is? I’m genuinely curious.

D has a native IDE and working REPL OOTB. They are all jealous!
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