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Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#13

Post by dom96 »

themartorana wrote: post #9

All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its spe…

The reason, in my opinion at least, is that Nim does not have a commercial company behind it like Go and Rust who have Google and Mozilla respectively.

This in turn means that Nim does not have as many resources (it is developed completely voluntarily in people's spare time) so development is slower.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#14

Post by logicchains »

Something I find quite interesting about Nim is write tracking: http://nim-lang.org/blog/writetracking.html. It uses the language's effect system, and allows not only specifying for instance that a function is referentially transparent, but also specifying how an impure function accesses or modifies global state.

An example from the above link:

    var gId = 0

    proc genId(): natural {.writes: [gId].} =
      gId += 1
      return gId
To quote the article: "Here the effect systems shows its strength: Imagine there was a genId2 that writes to some other global variable; then genId and genId2 can be executed in parallel even though they are not free of side effects!"

The effect system can also be used for exception tracking, specifying what kind of exceptions are function may throw. It can moreover be extended to work with user-defined effects.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#15

Post by def- »

qznc wrote: post #10
themartorana wrote: post #9

All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its spe…

There is no technical reason why Rust should be slower than Nim, as far as I know.

Nim has the advantage of compiling to/through C, for which compilers have been optimized for a long time.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#17

Post by cremno »

themartorana wrote: post #9

All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its spe…

>why it's not as hyped

I don't know how relevant that is, but Rust has Mozilla (and Samsung?) and Go has Google plus some Unix / Plan 9 people behind it. But Nim? There are probably other factors as well.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#18

Post by chipsy »

themartorana wrote: post #9

All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its spe…

Rust and Go have big backers behind them. This generates a feedback loop of hype leading to toy projects and thought leadership, which subsequently turns into real adoption. If weren't for that they would be maturing at about the same rate as Nim.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#20

Post by chipsy »

logicchains wrote: post #14

Something I find quite interesting about Nim is write tracking: http://nim-lang.org/blog/writetracking.html . It uses the language's effect system, and allows not only specifying for instance that a function is referentially transparent, but also specifying how an impure function accesses or modifies global state. An example from the above link: var gId = 0 proc genId(): natural {.writes: [gId].} = gId += 1 return gI…

A lot of features in Nim show a similar kind of designed pragmatism. It's big, and has a lot of stuff that you just won't use in everyday situations, but the uncommon features tend to hit really specific engineering problems that do come up in the real world. I like it a lot better than what I see coming out of Rust, at least at this moment.
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