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What is special about Nim?

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Re: What is special about Nim?

#61

Post by zahary »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #58
benhoyt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to flesh that out a bit?

When I saw that the top comment is a list of language features which are mostly extremely old, I thought that was interesting, so I pointed out how old those features are. And got hammered for it in spite of the fact that it's true. Obviously, it doesn't matter whether those features are old or new. What matters is whether the language executes them in a compelling way. But almost every single one of those features h…

Well, you have to combine just two of these features to leave Nim in a very small company of languages, mostly developed in the last decade. Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum and Nim is unifying them in a single package - that's what people are excited about.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#62

Post by sillysaurus3 »

zahary wrote: post #61
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw that the top comment is a list of language features which are mostly extremely old, I thought that was interesting, so I pointed out how old those features are. And got hammered for it in spite of the fact that it's true. Obviously, it doesn't matter whether those features are old or new. What matters is whether the language executes them in a compelling way. But almost every single one of those features h…

Well, you have to combine just two of these features to leave Nim in a very small company of languages, mostly developed in the last decade. Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum and Nim is unifying them in a single package - that's what people are excited about.

Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum

Actually, Lisp has been executing regular code at compile time with good performance since the tail end of the 1980's. Maybe even before that. This is why I said "everything old is new again."

Re: What is special about Nim?

#63

Post by klibertp »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #58
benhoyt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to flesh that out a bit?

When I saw that the top comment is a list of language features which are mostly extremely old, I thought that was interesting, so I pointed out how old those features are. And got hammered for it in spite of the fact that it's true. Obviously, it doesn't matter whether those features are old or new. What matters is whether the language executes them in a compelling way. But almost every single one of those features h…

To be a bit more specific as to where else these ideas are found:

  * Run regular code at compile time
Lisp, of course. Since very long ago.

  * Extend the language (AST templates and macros);
    this can be used to add a form of list comprehensions to the language!
Lisp, but also Dylan, Elixir, JS with Sweet.js and more. See for example here: https://opendylan.org/articles/macro-system/index.html

  * Add your own optimizations to the compiler!
I'm not sure here.

  * Bind (easily) to your favorite C functions and libraries
Almost every serious language has FFI for C. Nimrod offers a possibility to use statically linked libraries, which is not very popular, but for example Gambit Scheme does this since long ago.

  * Unified Call Syntax, so mystr.len() is equivalent to len(mystr)
Lua, somewhat. Also Dylan again.

  * Good performance -- not placing too much emphasis on this,
    but it's faster than C++ in his benchmark
Too many to count.

  * Compile to JavaScript
OCaml. And more: almost every language has a compile-to-JS project for it (although only a couple are workable).

EDIT:

> typesafe enums are also extremely old

Aren't those just sum types? This would make them as old as ML at least.

This of course doesn't make Nimrod any less interesting a language and some combinations of those features may be rather novel. Still, 'everything old is new again' I think is 100% true for all of these features. In reality you won't ever encounter truly unprecedented features in general purpose languages and outside of academia: one can go to LtU site for those. All the rest languages are built on really old (proven) concepts, which they reimplement and package in a (very) different ways. I have no idea why would you get downvoted for stating such fact.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#64

Post by sillysaurus3 »

klibertp wrote: post #63
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw that the top comment is a list of language features which are mostly extremely old, I thought that was interesting, so I pointed out how old those features are. And got hammered for it in spite of the fact that it's true. Obviously, it doesn't matter whether those features are old or new. What matters is whether the language executes them in a compelling way. But almost every single one of those features h…

To be a bit more specific as to where else these ideas are found: * Run regular code at compile time Lisp, of course. Since very long ago. * Extend the language (AST templates and macros); this can be used to add a form of list comprehensions to the language! Lisp, but also Dylan, Elixir, JS with Sweet.js and more. See for example here: https://opendylan.org/articles/macro-system/index.html * Add your own optimizatio…

I have no idea why would you get downvoted for stating such fact.

And not merely downvoted, but karma carpet bombed (-10). Such an honor used to be reserved for troll comments rather than true statements.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#65

Post by tux3 »

>Yes, that's right: All we had to do was replace the var with a const. Beautiful, isn't it? We can write the exact same code and have it run at runtime and compile time. No template metaprogramming necessary.

Worth pointing out is that modern C++ does this too. Just add a constexpr, no metaprogramming necessary. Modern C++ really does feel like a new language.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#66

Post by TylerE »

klibertp wrote: post #63
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I saw that the top comment is a list of language features which are mostly extremely old, I thought that was interesting, so I pointed out how old those features are. And got hammered for it in spite of the fact that it's true. Obviously, it doesn't matter whether those features are old or new. What matters is whether the language executes them in a compelling way. But almost every single one of those features h…

To be a bit more specific as to where else these ideas are found: * Run regular code at compile time Lisp, of course. Since very long ago. * Extend the language (AST templates and macros); this can be used to add a form of list comprehensions to the language! Lisp, but also Dylan, Elixir, JS with Sweet.js and more. See for example here: https://opendylan.org/articles/macro-system/index.html * Add your own optimizatio…

Simple... the list of languages that provide Lisp-level dynamism AND C level performance is rather short.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#67

Post by sillysaurus3 »

TylerE wrote: post #66
klibertp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be a bit more specific as to where else these ideas are found: * Run regular code at compile time Lisp, of course. Since very long ago. * Extend the language (AST templates and macros); this can be used to add a form of list comprehensions to the language! Lisp, but also Dylan, Elixir, JS with Sweet.js and more. See for example here: https://opendylan.org/articles/macro-system/index.html * Add your own optimizatio…

Simple... the list of languages that provide Lisp-level dynamism AND C level performance is rather short.

Have you ever actually used Lisp, or are you going off of speculation? I have. It can deliver just short of C level performance.

This is like someone going onto a forum and saying "Java is slow!" while ignoring the fact that trading institutions use Java as their primary language for stock market trading. And they wouldn't do that if Java was slow.

I'm trying to be as patient as possible, but this is really getting out of hand. Most people in this comment thread simply have no idea what they're talking about.

Specifically, look up "GOAL Lisp". Gamedevs wouldn't use Lisp if Lisp wasn't capable of providing performance comparable to C. The entire company would've died.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#68

Post by zahary »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #62
zahary wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you have to combine just two of these features to leave Nim in a very small company of languages, mostly developed in the last decade. Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum and Nim is unifying them in a single package - that's what people are excited about.

Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum Actually, Lisp has been executing regular code at compile time with good performance since the tail end of the 1980's. Maybe even before that. This is why I said "everything old is new again."

Depends on your definition of "good performance". Idiomatic lisp was never able to compete with the Fortran-s and C/C++-s of its age, but Nim is.

Re: What is special about Nim?

#69

Post by grayrest »

barbudorojo wrote: post #51

What I don't like about Nim is that there is not a repl. In Lisp and Clojure you don't need to compile things. Could someone give a brief comparison between Clojure and Nim? Let's suppose that we implement Clojure in Nim is this a crazy idea?, What about implementing Shen in Nim?. Many people complain because sbcl is not easy to use with C++ libraries, could an implementation in Nim amilliorate those problems?. Many…

The closest thing to what you're asking about is Pixie [1], which is a Clojure-like language implemented in Pypy's RPython.

[1] https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie

It'd be possible to implement a Clojure in Nim, you'd just have to port the datastructures and enough primitives to bootstrap the language core (see core.clj, Clojurescript's core.clj, Pixie's stdlib.pxi).

Re: What is special about Nim?

#70

Post by sillysaurus3 »

zahary wrote: post #68
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum Actually, Lisp has been executing regular code at compile time with good performance since the tail end of the 1980's. Maybe even before that. This is why I said "everything old is new again."

Depends on your definition of "good performance". Idiomatic lisp was never able to compete with the Fortran-s and C/C++-s of its age, but Nim is.

"Good performance": Within a factor of ~2 to ~4 of native C.

No one said idiomatic Lisp was performant. They said Lisp was performant. Seriously, it's not even difficult. It's not like it's a situation where it's easy to accidentally kill your performance by writing elegant code while having no idea why it's slow.

Optimizing a Lisp codebase is a straightforward exercise, no more difficult than optimizing a Lua or Javascript codebase.

If someone hasn't shipped more than a toy program with Lisp, it's easy to believe the opposite. But if you try it, you'll see that it's true.

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