9 ms·

Nim partners with Status.im

174 points by dom96 8y ago

FridgeSeal 8y ago
That’s awesome, congratulations Nim team!
partisan 8y ago
This is great news. Nim (and the team working on it) deserves much support and praise. It is a language that enables C/C++ programmers to be more productive and makes performant programming approachable for beginners as well.
ankitbgupta3 8y ago
Amazing. Interesting to see programming language teams getting together with web3.0 teams.
prideout 8y ago
I've played with Nim, I think it's great and deserves more attention. Especially in the scientific computing and gamedev communities. It has Python-like terseness, static typing, and simple C interop.
CharlesW 8y ago
Nim is new to me and I'm missing the "why" of it. From the website, I'm getting "we like Python but wanted to compile to native code and JavaScript". Is that fair?
- dom96 8y ago
  That's why I started using it. But Nim is much more than just this, it's more like "We like Python, but we also like static typing, efficient and dependency-free programs, super easy C/C++ FFI and metaprogramming. We also like to write all our software in the same programming language so we compile to JavaScript" :)
  - wuschel 8y ago
    How is the concurrency story with Nim. I know that this is a repeating question, just wondering how well it works and how safe it is. I am still eyeballing Pony-lang for it's design choices, but development seems to have slowed down there.
    - dom96 8y ago
      Concurrency is achieved via async await. For parallelism each thread has its own GC so that makes things a lot safer, but sadly less efficient if your algorithm wants to share data between threads a lot (you can copy data between threads). You can also allocate shared memory but that's considered unsafe, this will hopefully be improved in the future. As for how well this all works, well, I recently implemented a high performance parallel HTTP server [1]. It's currently hosting the Nim Forum[2] and has been doing so for the past few months. Also it's proving very performant[3]. 1 - https://github.com/dom96/httpbeast https://github.com/dom96/httpbeast 2 - http://forum.nim-lang.org/ http://forum.nim-lang.org/ 3 - https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=b9d29130-bd5a-4c2a-829d-352613d03cd2&hw=ph&test=plaintext https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=b...
      - wuschel 8y ago
        Many thanks for the detailed answer & ref.links.
      - michaelsbradley 8y ago
        It would be amazing if Pony Lang's[+] concurrency model could be realized in Nim, or if Nim could be extended as a language to optionally and cleanly support it. That's easier said than done, of course, since Pony's concurrency model is deeply wedded to its type system ("reference capabilities"). [+] https://www.ponylang.org/discover/#what-makes-pony-different https://www.ponylang.org/discover/#what-makes-pony-different
    - spooneybarger 8y ago
      We are still going strong in Pony land. There an ebb and flow to publicly seen development.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  That seems about right. Another big benefit of this is performace. Nim is a lot faster than python.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  "A performant but garbage collected language with nice syntax that compiles to C. Plus hygienic macros."
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  More or less - easy and intuitive like Python (or better), fast almost like C.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I would say Nim is far less intuitive than Python, and it’s better to only iteratively refactor occasional subsets of your code for heavy performance, and not presume you need all parts to have C-like speed (you don’t). This is why I think choosing to begin a project in Nim (or C++), is a form of drastic premature optimization, compared with Python and iterative usage of Cython.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      > not presume you need all parts to have C-like speed (you don’t). Why not? If you can, if it's easy, not error-prone, you feel comfortable with it? Performance gain is something every user will appreciate.
      - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        I think that’s a false question. The point is that it’s actually not easy, not even in Nim (in fact, especially not in Nim). Writing safe and effective Python is easy. So then where do you go from there for the ~10% of the codebase where a user could conceivably ever care at all about performance enhancements? Wholesale switching to a different language is quite a drastic (premature) decision in such case, whereas Cython gives you the same (actually even better) facilities for type safety and detailed performance optimization, and offers it crucially on a case by case basis. I see a lot of cheering for Nim on this front. It makes me happy that some people enjoy Nim and like to use it. Cool! But it makes me sad to see the significantly wrong-headed discussions about it as a practical alternative to Python + Cython. It’s the opposite: choosing Nim is a wildly impractical way to get what Python + Cython does better.
        klibertp 8y ago
        That's exactly what many said about Go. It was largely disproven since then. You can integrate Nim code into your Python codebase just as readily as any other compiled language, including Cython. Cython produces shared libraries conforming to Python C-API, and you can do the same in Nim. Having very similar, but different in surprising ways, language for extensions may be actually more of a problem then what developer familiarity might buy you. Instead of a mish-mash of two languages like Cython, using a proper language with its specific set of abstractions might be better, depending on a use case. I would like to know what you consider the "better facilities" for type safety and performance optimizations Cython has that Nim lacks?
gooseus 8y ago
Way to go team Nim! I was dabbling in this community almost a year ago before being distracted by work/life, very fun and supportive. Still enjoy wearing my Nim t-shirt and look forward to returning to some dabbling in the (hopefully near) future.
gammateam 8y ago
So nobody is going to comment on why Status.im even exists? 100m dollars for an "open source mobile dApp browser" and messaging system, when dApp browsers are dime a dozen, open source, and pretty good! Trust Wallet any one? Toshi? Hopefully all those bucks can be used to propel development of other things, like with Nim and a real sharding ecosystem.
- zacharycarter 8y ago
  I know a lot about Nim, not nearly as much about crypto / Status, but their blog does reveal quite a bit of information about what they're trying to accomplish.
- yenda 8y ago
  The two wallets you mention are not running an ethereum like client on the phone and are therefore depending on third parties to get access to the ethereum network.
  - d357r0y3r 8y ago
    Running a node on a phone sounds like a horrible idea. Why would this be desirable? This is a solved problem and I never understand why people keep going back to it. Host a node or use a public node. Use a local wallet to do signing and depend on the public node for RPC calls. The vast majority of users and clients do not need to be dealing with Ethereum nodes on their own devices, they just need good key management systems.
    - noman-land 8y ago
      It's desirable for a couple reasons. Firstly, the node enables whisper, which is a p2p messaging protocol. You can't do p2p messaging with a public node, and nearly zero users will host their own nodes. Also, public nodes can be DOSed or otherwise taken down. They can invisibly filter the requests they receive. Some jurisdictions could have the nodes completely blocked. The point here is to build a fully p2p system, so running an on-device node is an attempt to do that. That doesn't mean that public nodes can't also still exist.
Nimitz14 8y ago
Awesome!
sdegutis 8y ago
This is great news Dominik. I remember speaking to you guys in your IRC channel a few years ago about Nim, and you all answered my questions and criticisms very professionally, and I really liked the direction you have all taken with Nim. This post is a good reminder to write something fun in it tonight. :)
mlevental 8y ago
very cool. hopefully you guys take off. i love python for being productive but static typing and easier distribution (compiling down to binary) are killer features for a language with similar semantics/expressiveness.
ilaksh 8y ago
Nim is still the best language I know of in terms of clean code, speed, metaprogramming, FFI, etc. And I think a sharded and/or light client/browser for Ethereum could actually replace banking and potentially a ton of other applications if it becomes popular. The trick will be all of the competition in terms of clients. Rather than Dapp browsers I would like to see a lightweight mobile client library and server combo that would allow me to just build a freestanding app. Maybe just a lightweight client rather than an actual node. Or maybe have a way to install the ethereum node server only if it's not already there. But with when sharding actually comes online I am very hopeful that Ethereum will blow up. So I may buy some more Ether tonight.
- k__ 8y ago
  I'd wish there was a Rust with Nim syntax, haha.
  - creatornator 8y ago
    I suppose something close might be OCAML or Haskell, since they have similar type safety to Rust (whose syntax is loosely based on OCAML from what I understand) but have some nice features that Python and Nim use like list comprehensions and generators, lazy evaluating, etc. But also with Rust macros you can sort of make your own sub-DSL's which add some of those features.
    - k__ 8y ago
      Yes, I know about the ML syntax languages, they are pretty cool, but Rusts unique selling point is the borrow-checker. Getting GC style code without runtime overhead.
gregn610 8y ago
Is there a transpiling / migration story for a python code base into Nim? I briefly looked at Nuitka to get to a dependency free binary from python but this could be another approach.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Just use Cython in that case.
- dom96 8y ago
  There is some experimental stuff, py2nim for example: https://github.com/metacraft-labs/py2nim https://github.com/metacraft-labs/py2nim

174 points by dom96 8y ago

That’s awesome, congratulations Nim team!

This is great news. Nim (and the team working on it) deserves much support and praise. It is a language that enables C/C++ programmers to be more productive and makes performant programming approachable for beginners as well.

ankitbgupta3 8y ago

Amazing. Interesting to see programming language teams getting together with web3.0 teams.

prideout 8y ago

I've played with Nim, I think it's great and deserves more attention. Especially in the scientific computing and gamedev communities. It has Python-like terseness, static typing, and simple C interop.

CharlesW 8y ago

Nim is new to me and I'm missing the "why" of it. From the website, I'm getting "we like Python but wanted to compile to native code and JavaScript". Is that fair?

dom96 8y ago
That's why I started using it. But Nim is much more than just this, it's more like "We like Python, but we also like static typing, efficient and dependency-free programs, super easy C/C++ FFI and metaprogramming. We also like to write all our software in the same programming language so we compile to JavaScript" :)
- wuschel 8y ago
  How is the concurrency story with Nim. I know that this is a repeating question, just wondering how well it works and how safe it is. I am still eyeballing Pony-lang for it's design choices, but development seems to have slowed down there.
  - dom96 8y ago
    Concurrency is achieved via async await. For parallelism each thread has its own GC so that makes things a lot safer, but sadly less efficient if your algorithm wants to share data between threads a lot (you can copy data between threads). You can also allocate shared memory but that's considered unsafe, this will hopefully be improved in the future. As for how well this all works, well, I recently implemented a high performance parallel HTTP server [1]. It's currently hosting the Nim Forum[2] and has been doing so for the past few months. Also it's proving very performant[3]. 1 - https://github.com/dom96/httpbeast https://github.com/dom96/httpbeast 2 - http://forum.nim-lang.org/ http://forum.nim-lang.org/ 3 - https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=b9d29130-bd5a-4c2a-829d-352613d03cd2&hw=ph&test=plaintext https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=b...
    - wuschel 8y ago
      Many thanks for the detailed answer & ref.links.
    - michaelsbradley 8y ago
      It would be amazing if Pony Lang's[+] concurrency model could be realized in Nim, or if Nim could be extended as a language to optionally and cleanly support it. That's easier said than done, of course, since Pony's concurrency model is deeply wedded to its type system ("reference capabilities"). [+] https://www.ponylang.org/discover/#what-makes-pony-different https://www.ponylang.org/discover/#what-makes-pony-different
  - spooneybarger 8y ago
    We are still going strong in Pony land. There an ebb and flow to publicly seen development.
nicoburns 8y ago
That seems about right. Another big benefit of this is performace. Nim is a lot faster than python.
Symmetry 8y ago
"A performant but garbage collected language with nice syntax that compiles to C. Plus hygienic macros."
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
More or less - easy and intuitive like Python (or better), fast almost like C.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I would say Nim is far less intuitive than Python, and it’s better to only iteratively refactor occasional subsets of your code for heavy performance, and not presume you need all parts to have C-like speed (you don’t). This is why I think choosing to begin a project in Nim (or C++), is a form of drastic premature optimization, compared with Python and iterative usage of Cython.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    > not presume you need all parts to have C-like speed (you don’t). Why not? If you can, if it's easy, not error-prone, you feel comfortable with it? Performance gain is something every user will appreciate.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      I think that’s a false question. The point is that it’s actually not easy, not even in Nim (in fact, especially not in Nim). Writing safe and effective Python is easy. So then where do you go from there for the ~10% of the codebase where a user could conceivably ever care at all about performance enhancements? Wholesale switching to a different language is quite a drastic (premature) decision in such case, whereas Cython gives you the same (actually even better) facilities for type safety and detailed performance optimization, and offers it crucially on a case by case basis. I see a lot of cheering for Nim on this front. It makes me happy that some people enjoy Nim and like to use it. Cool! But it makes me sad to see the significantly wrong-headed discussions about it as a practical alternative to Python + Cython. It’s the opposite: choosing Nim is a wildly impractical way to get what Python + Cython does better.
      - klibertp 8y ago
        That's exactly what many said about Go. It was largely disproven since then. You can integrate Nim code into your Python codebase just as readily as any other compiled language, including Cython. Cython produces shared libraries conforming to Python C-API, and you can do the same in Nim. Having very similar, but different in surprising ways, language for extensions may be actually more of a problem then what developer familiarity might buy you. Instead of a mish-mash of two languages like Cython, using a proper language with its specific set of abstractions might be better, depending on a use case. I would like to know what you consider the "better facilities" for type safety and performance optimizations Cython has that Nim lacks?

gooseus 8y ago

Way to go team Nim! I was dabbling in this community almost a year ago before being distracted by work/life, very fun and supportive. Still enjoy wearing my Nim t-shirt and look forward to returning to some dabbling in the (hopefully near) future.

gammateam 8y ago

So nobody is going to comment on why Status.im even exists? 100m dollars for an "open source mobile dApp browser" and messaging system, when dApp browsers are dime a dozen, open source, and pretty good! Trust Wallet any one? Toshi? Hopefully all those bucks can be used to propel development of other things, like with Nim and a real sharding ecosystem.

zacharycarter 8y ago
I know a lot about Nim, not nearly as much about crypto / Status, but their blog does reveal quite a bit of information about what they're trying to accomplish.
yenda 8y ago
The two wallets you mention are not running an ethereum like client on the phone and are therefore depending on third parties to get access to the ethereum network.
- d357r0y3r 8y ago
  Running a node on a phone sounds like a horrible idea. Why would this be desirable? This is a solved problem and I never understand why people keep going back to it. Host a node or use a public node. Use a local wallet to do signing and depend on the public node for RPC calls. The vast majority of users and clients do not need to be dealing with Ethereum nodes on their own devices, they just need good key management systems.
  - noman-land 8y ago
    It's desirable for a couple reasons. Firstly, the node enables whisper, which is a p2p messaging protocol. You can't do p2p messaging with a public node, and nearly zero users will host their own nodes. Also, public nodes can be DOSed or otherwise taken down. They can invisibly filter the requests they receive. Some jurisdictions could have the nodes completely blocked. The point here is to build a fully p2p system, so running an on-device node is an attempt to do that. That doesn't mean that public nodes can't also still exist.

Nimitz14 8y ago

Awesome!

sdegutis 8y ago

This is great news Dominik. I remember speaking to you guys in your IRC channel a few years ago about Nim, and you all answered my questions and criticisms very professionally, and I really liked the direction you have all taken with Nim. This post is a good reminder to write something fun in it tonight. :)

mlevental 8y ago

very cool. hopefully you guys take off. i love python for being productive but static typing and easier distribution (compiling down to binary) are killer features for a language with similar semantics/expressiveness.

ilaksh 8y ago

Nim is still the best language I know of in terms of clean code, speed, metaprogramming, FFI, etc. And I think a sharded and/or light client/browser for Ethereum could actually replace banking and potentially a ton of other applications if it becomes popular. The trick will be all of the competition in terms of clients. Rather than Dapp browsers I would like to see a lightweight mobile client library and server combo that would allow me to just build a freestanding app. Maybe just a lightweight client rather than an actual node. Or maybe have a way to install the ethereum node server only if it's not already there. But with when sharding actually comes online I am very hopeful that Ethereum will blow up. So I may buy some more Ether tonight.

k__ 8y ago
I'd wish there was a Rust with Nim syntax, haha.
- creatornator 8y ago
  I suppose something close might be OCAML or Haskell, since they have similar type safety to Rust (whose syntax is loosely based on OCAML from what I understand) but have some nice features that Python and Nim use like list comprehensions and generators, lazy evaluating, etc. But also with Rust macros you can sort of make your own sub-DSL's which add some of those features.
  - k__ 8y ago
    Yes, I know about the ML syntax languages, they are pretty cool, but Rusts unique selling point is the borrow-checker. Getting GC style code without runtime overhead.

gregn610 8y ago

Is there a transpiling / migration story for a python code base into Nim? I briefly looked at Nuitka to get to a dependency free binary from python but this could be another approach.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Just use Cython in that case.
dom96 8y ago
There is some experimental stuff, py2nim for example: https://github.com/metacraft-labs/py2nim https://github.com/metacraft-labs/py2nim