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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

#21

Post by vanderZwan »

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…

Out of curiosity: why is it hard for compilers to keep track of this automatically? At least, my gut feeling says that if it had been easy to do, this would be a solved design problem in newly developed languages by now - at least the statically compiled ones like Nim.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#22

Post by jgallag8 »

def- wrote: post #15
qznc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rust uses LLVM, I believe, and LLVM does as good a job optimizing as just about anything else out there.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#23

Post by vanderZwan »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #11

Why did they change the name?

TLA FTW?

Although it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the difference between typing three or five characters to compile is a huge deal in programmer land. Just like how a few tenths of a second of extra loading makes an enormous difference in customer satisfaction with the Google:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-u...

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#24

Post by simias »

def- wrote: post #15
qznc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rust uses LLVM as a backend so it gets similar optimization passes as clang for instance, so it's not so different. Basically rustc generates LLVM IR where Nim generates C, apparently. In most of the benchmarks I've seen so far you could expect similar performances between C and Rust.

Not to start a language flamewar but I'd like to see hard numbers before I believe that in the general case Nim is faster than Rust.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#26

Post by dom96 »

simias wrote: post #24
def- wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Rust uses LLVM as a backend so it gets similar optimization passes as clang for instance, so it's not so different. Basically rustc generates LLVM IR where Nim generates C, apparently. In most of the benchmarks I've seen so far you could expect similar performances between C and Rust. Not to start a language flamewar but I'd like to see hard numbers before I believe that in the general case Nim is faster than Rust.

Have you seen these benchmarks? https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/writeu...

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#27

Post by ebbv »

Maybe it's just me but I find this language pretty ugly. And regardless of any technical advantages it may offer, that's enough reason to not use it. There's too many languages out there to come out with a new one where the code isn't clean and nice.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#28

Post by simias »

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…

For me the feature that makes Rust stand out is memory safety without garbage collection. It's got all the goodness you'd expect from a modern programming language while giving me basically all the flexibility I could get from writing C or C++. That's a very strong differencing trait, at least for me.

I've never used Nim and I should probably give it a try but it seems that the "garbage collected, parallel oriented" niche is somewhat more cluttered with the likes of Go, the various languages built on top of .Net or the JVM, the lisps, the haskells... Not all target exactly the same use cases but there's a lot of overlap here and it's harder to stand out.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#29

Post by [deleted] »

dom96 wrote: post #26
simias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust uses LLVM as a backend so it gets similar optimization passes as clang for instance, so it's not so different. Basically rustc generates LLVM IR where Nim generates C, apparently. In most of the benchmarks I've seen so far you could expect similar performances between C and Rust. Not to start a language flamewar but I'd like to see hard numbers before I believe that in the general case Nim is faster than Rust.

Have you seen these benchmarks? https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/writeu...

[deleted]

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#30

Post by vbit »

ebbv wrote: post #27

Maybe it's just me but I find this language pretty ugly. And regardless of any technical advantages it may offer, that's enough reason to not use it. There's too many languages out there to come out with a new one where the code isn't clean and nice.

Care to give an example of a language you find beautiful?
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