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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

#61

Post by klibertp »

noselasd wrote: post #51
klibertp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's being hyped that's weird. There are literally dozens of very interesting languages being created and developed right now and I bet you don't know of any of them. The only - and they are very few in comparison - languages which are being hyped since very early in their life cycle are the ones backed by corporations. Both Rust and Go are such languages and that's basically it. "Normal" languages live on a…

I'll add http://pike.lysator.liu.se/ to that list of "unknown" languages - It's my go-to language for doing simple prototyping.

Right, those were just examples, there are many (many!) more interesting languages.

Pike is a bit of a special case due to its history though. I first learned it in the 90ties, when I joined an effort to port some MUD from LPC - Pike's predecessor - to Pike. At the time both LPC and Pike looked very weird to me, coming from mostly static, compiled languages like C and Pascal. A "mixed" datatype (like void* in C) with type predicates was something new to me, built-in mappings and other high-level datatypes were too. I don't remember the details, but I think both Pike and LPC had an unusual object system, closer to prototype-oriented languages like Self, JS, Io or Lua than to "normal" class-based ones (but I may be wrong on this). Anyway, it's another good example of solid and mature but unpopular (to the point of obscurity) languages.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#63

Post by perturbation »

simias wrote: post #53
dom96 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have not, I mostly glanced at http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ where Rust generally matches C performance whithin a few %. But Nim is not part of this benchmark apparently. I haven't looked at your link in details but the fact that one C++ implementation manages to outperform all the others (including other C and C++ implementations and of course Rust and Nim) by more than one order of magnitude leaves me p…

>...one C++ implementation manages to outperform all the others ... by more than one order of magnitude

As does the cached Javascript version. All of the implementations in the path benchmarking by fiat use a naiive algorithm (recompute the cost for each recursive traversal). The C++ and Javascript cached versions are supposed to show that algorithm choice is much more important than language choice (and do some memoization of the cost calculation).

https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/jscach...

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#64

Post by wbhart »

klibertp wrote: post #36
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…

Actually it's being hyped that's weird. There are literally dozens of very interesting languages being created and developed right now and I bet you don't know of any of them. The only - and they are very few in comparison - languages which are being hyped since very early in their life cycle are the ones backed by corporations. Both Rust and Go are such languages and that's basically it. "Normal" languages live on a…

One of the things that kills some of these "completely unknown" languages is that it isn't obvious they are still being developed. The last known release is years ago, or they still only support one platform, etc.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#66

Post by idlewan »

simias wrote: post #53
dom96 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have not, I mostly glanced at http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ where Rust generally matches C performance whithin a few %. But Nim is not part of this benchmark apparently. I haven't looked at your link in details but the fact that one C++ implementation manages to outperform all the others (including other C and C++ implementations and of course Rust and Nim) by more than one order of magnitude leaves me p…

> he fact that one C++ implementation manages to outperform all the others (including other C and C++ implementations and of course Rust and Nim) by more than one order of magnitude leaves me perplex.

This uses a "pruning" algorithm and is a different algorithm than all the other implementations use. It shouldn't be used to compare the different languages, as it's just not doing the same work.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#67

Post by nocman »

Amezarak wrote: post #54
kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git (albeit not a language) has a similar meaning in the UK.

Even in the US, "git" means "idiot." It was my understanding Linus called Git for the same reason Mercurial is called Mercurial: as an unflattering reference to Larry McVoy, who was involved in the Linux/Bitkeeper mess. While typing this though, I discovered that Linux apparently denies this and says it's self-reference. ("I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git'".…

I'm assuming you meant to say the "Linux/BitKeeper" mess. McVoy is the BitKeeper guy.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#68

Post by wbhart »

infinite8s wrote: post #62

Can someone give a succinct description of the difference between Nim and Rust?

Nim has the feel of a compiled Python (with many additional features that Python is lacking). It is garbage collected, is designed to look as pseudocode'ish as possible.

Rust is designed for systems projects where GC is not a good idea, such as web browsers, or kernels, etc. One of its core design philosophies is to manage memory safely and efficiently.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#69

Post by k__ »

wbhart wrote: post #59
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 main reasons I think, are that Nim is not "production ready" and that other developers think of Nim as Andreas Rumpf's baby. In my opinion, this happens when a single author is responsible for most of the implementation of a language. Another example of this is the Crack language, which is still essentially controlled by one person, despite people declaring it "ready for writing useful code". Two things make non-…

Design by committee is inferior (too many cooks).

But most good maintainers I know listen to critique of the people who use their stuff.

More devs are good for another reason than disagreeing, if one doesn't work on the code anymore, there are others who can.

Re: Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

#70

Post by avz »

gokr wrote: post #57
ebbv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brief is not the same as lazy. I personally find comments that say what they mean to say in a short amount of text much more useful than ones that go on for paragraphs without saying anything new. I strive for brevity. I revised the one you responded to so you may want to check that now. As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: echo("Hello…

Wow, I just have to reply! Which one of these do you prefer: echo("Hello") echo "Hello" "Hello".echo "Hello".echo() Or something different?

This:

    cout
beats all of the above by a wide margin. It's essentially an ASCII-art ideographic representation of what the computer is supposed to do.
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