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Pros and Cons of Nim

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Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#61

Post by fluffything »

dmix wrote: post #31
sherincall wrote: post #21

While I rather like nim as a language, there's a few more cons that need to be considered for any real use of the language: - It has a bus/lottery factor of 1. The vast majority of all the changes were done by Araq and I have very little faith that the language would survive without him. This is even more pronounced with Zig (mentioned in comments here). - It has had some very embarrassing bugs after the 1.0 mileston…

> - It has a bus/lottery factor of 1. What was Rusts early years like? Was it one developer for the first part? I'd imagine this is not a big deal in the early days, where the benevolent dictator is as much the language as the project itself, not all technology adoption happens on the same timelines. Matz with Ruby took a long time to become super popular, Rich Hickey with Clojure seemed to be a powerhouse even as th…

When Rust 1.0 was released it had in the order of hundreds of developers doing work here and there.

When Rust started as a hobby project it was a one man effort, but it was also a project with ~1 user. It grew developers before actually growing users, and for a while, it had more developers than users.

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#63

Post by threatofrain »

beagle3 wrote: post #49
sherincall wrote: post #21

While I rather like nim as a language, there's a few more cons that need to be considered for any real use of the language: - It has a bus/lottery factor of 1. The vast majority of all the changes were done by Araq and I have very little faith that the language would survive without him. This is even more pronounced with Zig (mentioned in comments here). - It has had some very embarrassing bugs after the 1.0 mileston…

While Araq is BDFL and is still doing most of the implementation for Nim, there are nontrivial contributions from others, and commercial sponsorship at this point. And with respect to the ecosystem-at-large, there are tens of contributors and a very healthy package repository: nimble (package manager) written and maintained by dom96; arraymancer (tensor+array+nn) written and maintained by mratsim; an up-and-coming th…

I see one of the top jobs of the dictator as exercising reputation and credibility to gather and delegate expert work to expert lieutenants. If the years pass and you're still the lonely dictator...

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#64

Post by vips7L »

The_rationalist wrote: post #47
pjmlp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually type safe, with support for various kinds of automatic memory management. Pascal dialects, while much safer than C, suffer from use-after-free and possible memory leaks, also you don't need to mark unsafe code as such. This includes any modern Pascal variant.

Why use nim over Kotlin with AOT?

Kotlins stdlib is seriously lacking, at least the last time I looked at it, you couldn't even read a file without java.io.

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#65

Post by vips7L »

bE9a3S5So8igd3 wrote: post #10
navdb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people prefer Nim because of small things like syntax. However Go is much more popular. I will do more research on this subject and see if I can list the differences in detail. However any such list could be soon made redundant when Go 2 comes out.

Most of your list would probably remain intact. The main issue is that Go has a traditional garbage collector, and Nim has ARC, ORC, nogc, gogc, deferred reference counting, and more options for memory management.

Why are options a bad thing? What's the default? Is it reasonable?

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#66

Post by vips7L »

ptx wrote: post #58
The_rationalist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use nim over Kotlin with AOT?

I'm hopeful that Kotlin/Native will improve in these areas (excepting the last one) but: * Faster compilation. * Tooling is less memory-hungry. * C++ interop. * Macros.

Tooling as in intellij/gradle? I doubt they'll ever use less memory.

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#67

Post by carapace »

WJW wrote: post #38
hhmc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know the interpretation/etymology of 'lottery factor'? I assume it's the risk of the Key Person winning the lottery and abandoning the project? I guess it makes more sense in the context of rank-and-file employees, rather than passion projects...

It's a less morbid variant of "bus factor". Agree that it makes less sense than bus factor in this particular case.

It doesn't make any sense: you win the lottery and stop working on your baby?

I know it's not a big deal but it seems borderline superstitious to me.

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#68

Post by retro64 »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #62

I really like Nim and have been eager to try for a project -- though for anything other than a simple script/wrapper I'd really want to see source-level debugging support in VSCode for one or two of the backends.

Neverwinter Nights nwsync tools are written in Nim and the source is available to tinker with. I've compiled and used the tools on my FreeBSD box to break apart the modules and prepare them for nwsync distribution (nwsync is used for client/server asset management mostly for persistent worlds, but is handy for just running a one-off server with your buddies).

Now you can learn a bit about Nim and have fun doing it :)

A couple of links:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eYRTd6vzk7OrLpr2zlwnUk7m...

https://github.com/niv/neverwinter.nim

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#69

Post by neutronicus »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #45
nimmer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the lottery factor is concerning, also many corporate-driven languages have a similar risk: the company can drop the language or bend it out of shape to satisfy business needs. It happened many times.

Which languages are you referring to where it's happened many times? Racking my brains but falling short.

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Browser Wars come to mind

Re: Pros and Cons of Nim

#70

Post by renox »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #45
nimmer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the lottery factor is concerning, also many corporate-driven languages have a similar risk: the company can drop the language or bend it out of shape to satisfy business needs. It happened many times.

Which languages are you referring to where it's happened many times? Racking my brains but falling short.

Visual Basic
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