10 ms·

Since I have used Nim in a small team effort creating an enterprise data analysis application, let me put in a good word. The ease of coding and speed of execut

Since I have used Nim in a small team effort creating an enterprise data analysis application, let me put in a good word. The ease of coding and speed of execution was what caught our attention. I was expecting the worst (from past experiences with new languages) but we were so surprised that we could complete our project all in Nim. These are a few things that I love with Nim: - One's knowledge of Python jives really well with Nim. Thinking in Pythonic ways, a small number of constructs in Nim gets you a long way without gotchas that block you. For example you can easily integrate Numpy in minutes. - Statically typed, fast compilation, readable code, good module import system, binary executable that you can move around easily without installing anything more at distributed sites, and a built-in test and integration framework. - An efficient web server comes along, supports a practical and useful template system for small team web applications. Concurrency. Async dispatch/coroutines gives you back-end options to scale. - Nim's Postgres database client driver is glitch free, easy to use, and it turned out to be a real good work horse.

billrobertson42 8y ago
What about run-time safety? e.g. are the pointers? does it have builtin in array bounds checking? (Heck, does it even have arrays?)
- gtycomb 8y ago
  yes to all of these -- Nim also has those intrinsic benefits that statically checked and compiled languages bring. Arrays? As pleasantly nimble as Python arrays to say the least. Pointers are lengthy discussion, but suffice to say that pointers are smartly handled to avoid their pitfalls at runtime (while integrating with external C if you really need to) Time time and again as I went through using Nim, what really stuck with me was that the designers had thought through these practical matters so very well, and even in its current < 1 version the language is remarkably complete and robust for practical programmers.
  - billrobertson42 8y ago
    Thanks. That's very interesting. I don't suppose you're going to tell me that it has Clojure's amazing data structures too. :-)
    - PMunch 8y ago
      Well: https://github.com/PMunch/nim-persistent-vector https://github.com/PMunch/nim-persistent-vector But not built in. The basic data types are very light-weight in their implementations to cover a large range of needs.

billrobertson42 8y ago

What about run-time safety? e.g. are the pointers? does it have builtin in array bounds checking? (Heck, does it even have arrays?)

gtycomb 8y ago
yes to all of these -- Nim also has those intrinsic benefits that statically checked and compiled languages bring. Arrays? As pleasantly nimble as Python arrays to say the least. Pointers are lengthy discussion, but suffice to say that pointers are smartly handled to avoid their pitfalls at runtime (while integrating with external C if you really need to) Time time and again as I went through using Nim, what really stuck with me was that the designers had thought through these practical matters so very well, and even in its current < 1 version the language is remarkably complete and robust for practical programmers.
- billrobertson42 8y ago
  Thanks. That's very interesting. I don't suppose you're going to tell me that it has Clojure's amazing data structures too. :-)
  - PMunch 8y ago
    Well: https://github.com/PMunch/nim-persistent-vector https://github.com/PMunch/nim-persistent-vector But not built in. The basic data types are very light-weight in their implementations to cover a large range of needs.