Nim in 2020: A Short Recap

Post by didibus » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

nikki93 wrote: post #101

didibus wrote: post #11

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Seems Nim will do some static analysis where if it can infer a reference is locally scoped in some way, it will deterministically inject a call to the destructor at the end of the scope. If not, it will do reference counting which will also have (if using orc) an extra cycle detection pass so that the references count references can also handle cycles. Finally, Nim will also do some static analysis, and if it can inf…

Refcounted refs have copy and destruct semantics, and then what you're talking about is basically move semantics over those refs. Refcount increments be elided if the ref is "moved." The increment is only needed on copy. Additionally, a moved-from value doesn't need to be destructed (in the case of a refcounted ref -- decrementing the count and deallocating the pointed-at memory if count goes to zero). A talk about s…

Post by blackrock » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

cb321 wrote: post #95

GordonS wrote: post #94

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> There really is a lot more to Nim than just this I've actually just been skimming some tutorials and docs, and wow, you're not wrong! I'm impressed - Nim seems to be rammed with features, but also easy to get started with (as long as you ignore some of the more advanced stuff). I've recently been trying to find time and motivation to start learning Rust, but I have to say that (even with horrible indentation syntax…

If a little CLI app to do something useful (instead of say, some shell script/batch file or something) is your entry point then you might try cligen [1]. Everyone is different, but from many and varied reports (e.g. in this very thread [2]), it is hugely more probable that you get up & running with some basic skills in like 30 minutes to 4 hours or so with Nim than you would with Rust. Nim really seems to "scale up g…

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

mattarm wrote: post #77

zubspace wrote: post #53

I've used Nin for this years advent-of-code challenge. Never used Nim before but there are some great tutorials [1]. It's a nice language with a great standard library. Implicit static typing is great after a bit of getting used to. Some things like tuples or "Object Variants" are fun to use. The only thing I'm missing is strong debugging support. You can use GDB and there is even some basic support for debugging in…

I wouldn't consider interactive step debugging an essential feature in large programs. My experience with C++ is that once program becomes "large" or makes enough use of threads, gdb falls over anyway and you're stuck with logging and "print" debugging anyway.

Post by blackrock » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 11:03 AM UTC

cb321 wrote: post #116

blackrock wrote: post #113

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Nim’s available argument parser library needs some more maturity, as compared to Python. Python has a great argparse library, and it would be good if Nim could emulate that.

Well, cligen is pretty mature/featureful, less work to use and well maintained and is the most common recommendation in Nim. If you happen to like more verbosely specified CLI interfaces like Python's argparse there are at least two pretty close to the Python argparse -- therapist [1] and nim-argparse [2]. There is much more to any programming language than its stdlib. { If you find these insufficiently "drop-in comp…

Post by elcritch » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

weitzj wrote: post #118

elcritch wrote: post #105

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> How are your esp32 Nim deployments holding up? They're doing great! Nim has proven surprisingly stable, which was a fear I had at first. The core team has improved compiler support and I've not run into any issues updating so far. It bolster's my confidence in Nim. Even if Nim development were to suddenly "stop" tomorrow, it'd easily be useable for embedded for a decade or more. There's improvement to be made in Ni…

That’s very insightful. Thank you. Some more questions since you are the person which shows up for esp32 and nim in the whole wide world :) Did you try out the esp-idf 4.3 release yet? I think you mentioned somewhere to not use 4.2. but 4.3 gives you the esp-managed Mqtt service on Aws (rainmaker) Do you have any thoughts on Freertos vs Zephyr whilst using Nim?