Show HN: “Nim in Action” is now available

Even if you don't intend to purchase the book I would love to hear feedback from you about the first chapter (which is free!)[1]. Really excited about this book and am looking forward to any feedback at all from the HN community.

1 - https://manning-content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/6/df42fc6-...

I assume the distinction you are making about "serious" is around manual memory management and the GC?

In which case, I think you are probably right in your bias. That said and while i have no experience with it, Nim claims to have a real-time GC mechanism builtin. That is they support a max pause time parameter. There have been other real-time GC systems out there before and they tend to work well for other definitions of "serious".

So... why not using it to replace C and C++? Since I have worked with Nim (and I use it to implement my own language) I would say "hell yes"! It is such an immensely better language and it integrates perfectly with those eco systems. The GC is a good one (or well, there are 5 to choose from) and it is for many, many applications not an issue.

And before pcwalton drops in with his endless spamming about Nim not being safe, Nim being undefined etc etc (it's getting quite annoying), please spare us this time.

My impression of Nim is that it is what Go should have been, if language developments of the past 40 years were taken into account, so if you like the simplicity of Go's syntax, but want modern features, seriously consider Nim.

I personally couldn't get over the significant whitespace, (relying on invisible characters doesn't sit well with me) [1], but apart from that I like the language a lot!

@dom96 Do you think that the focus on web development is good to have? I realise that it is what a ton of people do these days, but since web developers already have so many technologies to pick from, perhaps selling the book as aimed more at system/game even native desktop developers could spring up more interest.

Also, how exactly is the garbage collector tied to the standard library and the language itself? For example, if I opt out of the GC completely, would I end up in a situation similar to D, where I'm not using GC but everything around me still is, so I have to carefully program around it, or is it handled differently? (And can you possibly compare Nim and D as the languages seem to be covering similar territory.)

Lastly, what major work still needs to be done before we see a 1.0 release and how best can we help Nim to move towards that goal right now?

Thanks, back to the book now...

1 - Maybe a gofmt style tool would help somewhat.

Historical accident: they started surfacing around the same time, Go was originally described as a systems language (which it never was according to the usual meaning of the term) and Rust had more application-level features (built-in "GC pointer", green threads). As incorrect as it was, the initial… impression? — it's probably the wrong term but I don't have a better one — remained.

Probably doesn't help that Rust also has a number of features Go is criticised for lacking (generics, non-nullable references, immutability support, …)