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Nim 1.6

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim 1.6

#51

Post by mst »

turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

It's not necessarily the best choice for everything for any given team, but in the same way you'll see e.g. shops that have bought in heavily to using go by default using go for writing scripty tools as well as their main applications, using nim as 'the default language unless there's a use case specific reason to use something else' is surprisingly doable.

Re: Nim 1.6

#52

Post by rattray »

sph wrote: post #41
turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

> I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything". Full stack Javascript enthusiasts are nowhere to be seen in this thread, but are writing their backend, frontend, desktop and mobile JS, WASM, Ethereum backend and the next ARM instruction set to speed up JS code natively, silently working towards total world domination. The nanomachines that will bring forth the end of the world…

JS is also great for scripting, but really isn't popular for ML or data science (no pandas/numpy/scipy equivalents I think, other than tensorflow.js).

I'm curious how Nim fares for DS/ML.

Re: Nim 1.6

#53

Post by coliveira »

turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

This is not a new concept, decades ago computer scientists started working on general purpose languages, that were supposed to be good for (almost) everything. The idea that a language has to serve a niche is a modern construction.

Re: Nim 1.6

#54

Post by benttoothpaste »

turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

I heard PL/I was the original language for “everything”. It’s not a new concept :)

Re: Nim 1.6

#55

Post by wiremine »

I learned Nim last year by rewriting some of the core Arduino functionality in C, and then wrapping them in Nim. (I also wanted to better learn C and better understand how Arduino's internals work, thus the convoluted approach)

A few observations:

* The community was very helpful and responsive. I identified a bug in compiling Nim to bare metal C, and it was fixed in 24 hours.

* The C/Nim bindings were a breeze to use, even for a relatively novice C programmer like myself.

* The language is fairly sparse, in a good way. It feels a bit like Go in that regard, but with better metaprogramming support.

* I personally like meaningful, Python-style whitespace, but I could see how that could be a turnoff. But I'd hope people can look beyond that and give the language a try.

* I could _actually_ use Nim to write code for an Arduino Uno, so the project was a success. The firmware sizes weren't that bad, either, which was my biggest concern. Nim's memory management is very flexible, and the ARC system seemed to work great without the need for GC. [1]

[1] https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc...

Re: Nim 1.6

#56

Post by tyingq »

sp33der89 wrote: post #19
turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

Well no language is perfect, but Nim can be used in almost every domain because of it's compilation targets(C, C++, JS) and it's fast compile times(who needs interpretation when compile times are that fast!): * Shell scripting, I still assume most people will just use Bash tho: https://github.com/Vindaar/shell * Frontend: https://github.com/karaxnim/karax or you could bind to an existing JS library. * Backend: For so…

I looked at the emitted JS when the last Nim story came out. It needs some work there. Lots of globals with names that would likely collide with other existing JS.

Re: Nim 1.6

#57

Post by haxscramper »

Zababa wrote: post #48
turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

I think Nim is in the sweet spot for it. You start with basically OCaml, which is already a great start, add some knobs for tweaking memory management, some for high performance, and you're in a great places. Compiling to native and to JS allows you to do web, cli tooling, applications, high level gamedev. Fast compilation is important for scripting, high level gamedev, exploratory programming, scripting. High perfor…

I can't remember exact place where I've seen this discussion (I think it was on the nim IRC), but if I recall correctly, the original line of thought with nim was to take C (because fast/compiled/available-everywhere) and LISP (because flexible/extensible/good-ideas) and add more syntax sugar, so that user would not have to reimplement most of the syntax from scratch (using reader macros/special functions and so on).

There are of course a lot of other languages that influenced the syntax and semantics (like Ada, python, C++ and so on), and I omitted a huge number of extra considerations.

Re: Nim 1.6

#58

Post by guggle »

What's the state on:

- web frameworks / servers ? (ie. is there something like Sanic that is actively maintained ?) I imagine it's too early for a consensus.

- database drivers ? (postgresql is important here. I can live without an ORM)

Re: Nim 1.6

#59

Post by pietroppeter »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #42
pathsjs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who needs interpretation when compile times are that fast! Well, interpretation is pretty useful for a REPL. And a REPL is not just useful to avoid compilation, but also as a way to explore a new API. And, most importantly, to preserve the results of long computations when you do not know yet what to do with it. If computing a value takes half an hour, you certainly don't want to recompute it each time you change s…

This is exactly right. What is the REPL story with NIM? Having used a REPL, I cannot even imagine doing research & analytics without one. FWIW, this comparison between R, Pandas and Nim dataframes is quite encouraging: https://gist.github.com/Vindaar/6908c038707c7d8293049edb3d20... This is one of the aspects that self professed R/Python datascience contenders often get wrong. The very bare minimum is a well supported…

I did quench (most of) my thirst for a Repl building a notebook system (plug): https://github.com/pietroppeter/nimib

Based on that and using a book theme, scinim getting started documentation is being built, e.g.: https://scinim.github.io/getting-started/basics/data_wrangli...

Re: Nim 1.6

#60

Post by DennisP »

sp33der89 wrote: post #19
turminal wrote: post #18

> Why use Nim? > One language to rule them all: from shell scripting to web frontend and backend, scientific computing, deep learning, blockchain client, gamedev, embedded, see also some companies using Nim. Does that work in practice? I can't really imagine a single language that would be a good choice for "everything".

Well no language is perfect, but Nim can be used in almost every domain because of it's compilation targets(C, C++, JS) and it's fast compile times(who needs interpretation when compile times are that fast!): * Shell scripting, I still assume most people will just use Bash tho: https://github.com/Vindaar/shell * Frontend: https://github.com/karaxnim/karax or you could bind to an existing JS library. * Backend: For so…

Also one of Ethereum's proof-of-stake clients is written in Nim: https://nimbus.team/docs/index.html
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