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Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
21–30 of 271 posts
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#22No post body was provided.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#23The author seems to be very knowledgeable about the different aspects of programming. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, this article I think is a great starting point for learning about many interesting topics. Definitely bookmarked for later.
They sound like someone that is attracted to chasing the high of the next technology to learn rather than picking a language like C/C++ that would have worked and given them way more career stability.
Rather than mastering a bunch of programming languages they should have focused on one and built clout as a problem solver that doesn’t see a new shiny tool as a way to label their career. Boring popular language + focusing on building stuff and solving problems are the key to actual career growth.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with D is it still feels unpolished. Every time I try it - which is maybe once a year or so - the experience still feels weird and edge casey. The idea that a GC is somehow a hindrance to language adoption doesn't make any sense to me at all. Doesn't stop people loving Go. But go has slick tooling.
> The idea that a GC is somehow a hindrance to language adoption doesn't make any sense to me at all. Doesn't stop people loving Go. I meant as a systems programming language. To replace C or C++ or such.
Yeah fair enough.
Though I have to say - are there really that many scenarios in 2022 where a GC is unacceptable? Hard real time systems, sure. Tight loops in a high performance game engine - I can imagine. But... web servers? Graphical apps? Daemons?
I think there is a sweet spot for natively compiled languages, with garbage collectors, but also let you have a tight control of memory layout. There's really not many in this category.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#25Nim desperately needs a real web framework (batteries included) and a proper ORM and it will take off like wildfire. Python on steroids.
I think you’re very confused about the purpose of a systems programming language.
people just say it's a systems language, it doesnt have to be only this.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#26The best language to learn and use right now for systems programming is C/C++. It is by far the most marketable skill with 99.999999% of all low level systems written in C or C++. Large scale systems used by companies that pay top salaries for developers (Google/Meta) are written in C++. There is more material out there for learning and mastering these languages than any other language save maybe Python or JavaScript…
Most people prefer coding newer systems over legacy systems in old dialects of C and C++. So that skews things more heavily in favour of rust.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#27The author seems to be very knowledgeable about the different aspects of programming. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, this article I think is a great starting point for learning about many interesting topics. Definitely bookmarked for later.
They sound like someone that is attracted to chasing the high of the next technology to learn rather than picking a language like C/C++ that would have worked and given them way more career stability. Rather than mastering a bunch of programming languages they should have focused on one and built clout as a problem solver that doesn’t see a new shiny tool as a way to label their career. Boring popular language + focu…
That assumes a whole lot about their goals. If everyone sticks with C++ we would never have nice things like Zig/Nim/Rust that are advancing the conversation about how we should be doing systems programming tasks with code. C++ is quite influences by a lot of this. Like, let emm hack and learn. Also I think Nim is a very productive language to be hacking in and much easier to get going with than C++.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#28What’s the LSP and linter/formatter story these days? Last time I tried it the lsp was miles behind what I am used to from TypeScript land in vscode. I have gotten sooo used to all the auto completion, helpful error tooltips and auto imports and formatting on save that it felt tedious not to have that in a similar capacity. Maybe I was just doing things wrong and it’s been a while. In general I am super intrigued by nim coming from python originally. I wish I could use it professionally on a project just to spend more time with it
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#29I'm choosing between learning Nim or Rust. Nim frankly looks like the nicer of the two, but also less marketable and with smaller community. Suck to say but it's true.
Nim is also easier to learn - if you know Python and any conventional statically typed language, it's a walk in the park. I was producing fast, working code in a couple of hours. Learn Rust for your job, Nim for your side projects.
I had a similar experience. I took a very small project from Python and turned it into Nim: it was about six times as fast to run and took roughly the same amount of code in both. I have plans to learn more but this article is actually a little more fuel for my fire as I think one of my next explorations would be transferring and running code on other systems. If portability is as easy I could see this being used for some work tools I am building. We will almost surely never replace the current language all the major code is written in, but for small self-contained tools it would be great.
Re: Choosing Nim out of a crowded market for systems programming languages
#30> [..] I decided that I need a safe, fast, and statically typed language that can be compiled and targeted to both mobile and desktop environments, as well as being made available to scripting languages via FFI.
And you eliminated Rust because.. it’s too complicated? It meets these requirements to the letter! Since this is a greenfield effort, would it really be too expensive to invest some time to learn it?
Anyways, I wish OP the best with Nim. I’ve always found it to be an interesting language.