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Nim 2.0

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim 2.0

#31

Post by khaledh »

jadbox wrote: post #4

Anyone have working experience with Nim and Zig? I'd love to hear how they are similar and contrast. I'd also would like to see some idiomatic web server benchmarks between the two (now with Nim v2).

I've used both to work on a hobby OS project (Nim[1], Zig[2]). I very much prefer Nim. Code is succinct, elegant, and lets you focus on your core logic rather than fighting the language.

Zig is nice and I like its optionals support and error handling approach. But I was put off by its noisy syntax, e.g. !?[]u8 to represent an error union of an optional pointer to a many-pointer of uint8. Also having to prepare and weave allocators throughout most of the code that needs to dynamically allocate (which is most of the code) gets in the way of the main logic. Even little things like string concatenation or formatting becomes a chore. Zig also doesn't have dynamic dispatch, which makes polymorphic code hard to write; you have to work around it through some form of duck typing. In the end I realized that Zig is not for me.

[1] https://github.com/khaledh/axiom [2] https://github.com/khaledh/axiom-zig

Re: Nim 2.0

#34

Post by janAkali »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #27

Could be a fun python alternative Questions: - value/object semantic: i peeked at some code, and i can't tell what is a value, and what is a reference type, is everything heap allocated? - tooling: what's the state of their language server? does it work with all of their language features? - debugging: does gdb/lldb understand nim's types and slices? And finally: is a no-gc mode available? I'll play with it later tod…

1. Nim uses 'var' modifier to pass by reference, e.g. "proc (n: var int)...", default behaviour is pass by value. And there're also raw pointers and references (safe pointers).

>is a no-gc mode available?

You can disable gc, but most of standard library depends on it. But in Nim 2.0 there's finally support for ARC and ORC (ARC + cycle collector).

Re: Nim 2.0

#35

Post by ilaksh »

turnsout wrote: post #14

Nim looks awesome. Does anyone know why it doesn't have first-class support for wasm? That's the only thing that would keep me from diving into it more.

I think the short answer is it's built on top of C tooling so it doesn't really need another way to do it because you can use emscripten. Search their forum for "web assembly".

I did ask him about it eight years ago: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/1392#8675

But that was a little early on and there have been other priorities for the language.

Re: Nim 2.0

#36

Post by grok22 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #28
jadbox wrote: post #4

Anyone have working experience with Nim and Zig? I'd love to hear how they are similar and contrast. I'd also would like to see some idiomatic web server benchmarks between the two (now with Nim v2).

I maintain auto-generated bindings for my C libraries for Zig and Nim (and Odin and Rust - although the Rust bindings definitely need some love to make them a lot more idiomatic). I think looking at the examples (which is essentially the same code in different languages) gives you a high level idea, but they only scratch the surface when it comes to language features (for instance the Zig examples don't use any compt…

And which language did you enjoy coding in the most? Yeah, a subjective question :-). (Edit: Missed the auto-generated part, so maybe you don't have an opinion on experience regarding this?)

Re: Nim 2.0

#38

Post by jitl »

netbioserror wrote: post #29
remram wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, only being able to put pointers on the stack, no data, would make me think it "prefers the heap".

Dynamic data structures by their nature have to be allocated to the heap. What I mean by "prefers the stack" is that you don't have to make a managed ref and dereference a managed pointer type. You just make a `seq[int]`, use it as a `seq[int]`, and pass it as a `seq[int]`, just like stack data. Behind the scenes, it has a unique scoped pointer with no mental overhead.

Sounds like a vector/array/list in any other language after C++, like Go slice, Java ArrayList, Javascript array, Python list, Rust vec. Is there something I'm missing?

Re: Nim 2.0

#39

Post by janAkali »

Bostonian wrote: post #30

If your Python programs heavily use Pandas and Numpy, could there still be speed benefits to translating them to Nim?

Your programs could benefit from small dependency-free executables and compile time code generation and execution. Nim code can also be called directly from python or vice versa, check out nimpy[1].

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

Re: Nim 2.0

#40

Post by 999900000999 »

netbioserror wrote: post #2

Been happily crunching away at Nim in production. I'm working on what is mainly a data analysis and report generation tool, compiled as a CLI executable that gets called by server scripts. Nim makes fast, small executables. It has an excellent heterogenous JSON data structure and a good dataframe library. It prefers the stack so strongly that dynamic data structures (sequences and tables, basically its lists and dict…

It does indeed look like Python!

I hope it gets more popular, seems like a much much easier to use Rust

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