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Nim 1.4

nim-lang.org

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Re: Nim 1.4

#61

Post by tylorr »

nivviv wrote: post #51

A small perspective insight from a game developer: We (Beamdog) are using nim in production for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, for the serverside parts of running the multiplayer infra. nim is uniquely good in providing an immense amount of value for very little effort. It gets _out of my way_ and makes it very easy to write a lot of code that mostly works really well, without having given me any serious traps…

What's the dev experience been like? Do you feel like there is good editor support for debugging and such?

Re: Nim 1.4

#62

Post by cb321 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #58
nivviv wrote: post #51

A small perspective insight from a game developer: We (Beamdog) are using nim in production for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, for the serverside parts of running the multiplayer infra. nim is uniquely good in providing an immense amount of value for very little effort. It gets _out of my way_ and makes it very easy to write a lot of code that mostly works really well, without having given me any serious traps…

Interesting, thanks for sharing. May I ask, did you consider Go and decided against it for any reason considering your requirements of quick development, cross-platform, interoperability are all guaranteed features of Go which should have given better peace of mind considering a production application?

Go code runs much more slowly than Nim code in my experience. Nim realizes better ergonomics than Python in some ways (UFCS, command syntax, user-defined operators) and as good performance & lightweightness as C/Rust.

I'm honestly surprised Nim is not the secret weapon of many start-ups. Nim is much more "open architecture" instead of pushing some "single, canned turn-key fits most users" solutions.

Having a juggernaut like Google marketing/pushing/subsidizing something might provide false as well as true peaces of mind. :-) { Such peace is a multi-dimensional concept. :-) }

Re: Nim 1.4

#63

Post by cb321 »

samuell wrote: post #60

It is nice with a lot of innovation now in the ahead-of-time compiled languages camp. What worries me is the fragmentation, and the fact that no one language seems to check all of the (subjective set of) boxes for a general purpose high-speed, ahead-of-time compiled language [0]. E.g, Crystal seems to be the only one supporting a modern concurrency story (similar to Go), but has a huge problem with compile times. Nim…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9640384

Re: Nim 1.4

#64

Post by cb321 »

cb321 wrote: post #63
samuell wrote: post #60

It is nice with a lot of innovation now in the ahead-of-time compiled languages camp. What worries me is the fragmentation, and the fact that no one language seems to check all of the (subjective set of) boxes for a general purpose high-speed, ahead-of-time compiled language [0]. E.g, Crystal seems to be the only one supporting a modern concurrency story (similar to Go), but has a huge problem with compile times. Nim…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9640384

Also INim at the Nim-2020 conference for a REPL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa_9vut4TzQ&list=PLxLdEZg8DR...

In short, I think at least for the linked to table you mentioned, Nim does check all the boxes.

Re: Nim 1.4

#65

Post by nivviv »

tylorr wrote: post #61
nivviv wrote: post #51

A small perspective insight from a game developer: We (Beamdog) are using nim in production for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, for the serverside parts of running the multiplayer infra. nim is uniquely good in providing an immense amount of value for very little effort. It gets _out of my way_ and makes it very easy to write a lot of code that mostly works really well, without having given me any serious traps…

What's the dev experience been like? Do you feel like there is good editor support for debugging and such?

I've been using vscode+nim. Debugging was mostly just writing correct code in the first place! ;) The only gripe I have is sometimes nimsuggest hanging itself at 100% cpu use, and I have to kill it manually.

Even with the rather oldschool approach of echo/logging.nim usage, things tend to turn around quickly. I have not felt the need to be able to attach a debugger to the process, mostly because our architecture is very pluggable. Almost all events/interactions are on a message bus and can be hooked/handled individually.

Re: Nim 1.4

#66

Post by cb321 »

treeform wrote: post #57
untog wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think for me Nim could be a great answer for when I want to throw together a quick script. Right now I'll often use JS/Node for that and I'm not going to switch to Rust because it'll take a lot longer to get a rough and ready script going.

I have so many little nim scripts all over the place.

Unmentioned so far is the NimScript mode `nim e`..For a portable sort of alternative to Bash scripting ("sort of" from the presently much longer start-up time...).

Re: Nim 1.4

#67

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

cb321 wrote: post #62
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. May I ask, did you consider Go and decided against it for any reason considering your requirements of quick development, cross-platform, interoperability are all guaranteed features of Go which should have given better peace of mind considering a production application?

Go code runs much more slowly than Nim code in my experience. Nim realizes better ergonomics than Python in some ways (UFCS, command syntax, user-defined operators) and as good performance & lightweightness as C/Rust. I'm honestly surprised Nim is not the secret weapon of many start-ups. Nim is much more "open architecture" instead of pushing some "single, canned turn-key fits most users" solutions. Having a juggerna…

Statement on performance is surprising, I haven't personally benchmarked Nim against Go so couldn't say about that.

But I started using Go for the same reasons pointed out in parent and after being tired of changing Python code to C to resolve performance issues.

How about concurrency?

Re: Nim 1.4

#68

Post by nivviv »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #58
nivviv wrote: post #51

A small perspective insight from a game developer: We (Beamdog) are using nim in production for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, for the serverside parts of running the multiplayer infra. nim is uniquely good in providing an immense amount of value for very little effort. It gets _out of my way_ and makes it very easy to write a lot of code that mostly works really well, without having given me any serious traps…

Interesting, thanks for sharing. May I ask, did you consider Go and decided against it for any reason considering your requirements of quick development, cross-platform, interoperability are all guaranteed features of Go which should have given better peace of mind considering a production application?

Go was a consideration and there are a few libraries internally existed for Go at that point, but nim in the end won out on acceptance and it convinced - despite the known risks of using a only semi-mature language - on feasibility in getting it done in time for the initial game release.

The PoC was incredibly quick to manifest, and iterating on it had quickly proven itself as a good way forward.

Peace of mind was a judgment call. Despite being a rather sizeable project now, what we had back then was already very stable and reliable (even under heavy benchmark load) and there weren't any great unknowns souring making the call.

Re: Nim 1.4

#69

Post by historyremade »

Listen cowards of HN, Nim, Rust, Go etc all are try to replace King but failed. So don't reinvent the wheel please. I'd vote President Trump if he ban these shitty langs.

Re: Nim 1.4

#70

Post by 9214 »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #48

NIM and Red (also on HN today) seem both seem to have an interesting and intersecting feature set. Anybody here used or heavily evaluated both that can comment?

Nim and Red are quite different languages, both in terms of semantics and in terms of project's goals and scope. Perhaps you should elaborate on an intersection that you see between the two.

I can speak only for Red: it takes its heritage in Lisp, Forth and Logo, has an embeded cross-platform GUI engine with a dedicated DSL for UI building, C-like sub-language for system level programming, OMeta-like PEG parser, and unique type system with literal forms for things like currencies, URLs, e-mail and dates with hashtags; all of that fitting in one-megabyte binary and valuing human-centered design above all.

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