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Nim is a lovely language but I disagree with most of your points. * The Rust borrow checker prevents a lot of issues in C(++) code. Including thread safety. Ni

Nim is a lovely language but I disagree with most of your points. * The Rust borrow checker prevents a lot of issues in C(++) code. Including thread safety. Nim does not provide anything new in this regard. * The lack of a GC is a feature, not a detriment. One of the reasons why Rust applications are often very fast is because the language naturally guides you to avoid allocations when possible and allows low level control where necessary. Combined with the safety guarantees of the borrow checker, this is a powerful combination. This is possible in Nim but using GC is easier and will be the preferred solution when in doubt. * While Mozilla support does help a lot for sure, a lot of the hype around Rust (imo) comes from people trying it out, just falling in love with and then promoting it

discoball 8y ago
<< While Mozilla support does help a lot for sure, a lot of the hype around Rust (imo) comes from people trying it out, just falling in love with and then promoting it >> If there was no rampant tribalism, my comment would not be buried with negative votes. It would receive a response like the one you gave, which is subjective, and that would be the end of it. Some may even up-vote it because diversity is always good. But feels like Rust users are zealous and it's a bad sign, tbh. Wouldn't want to be part of a community that acted with hostility towards others for presenting alternative view points.
- the_duke 8y ago
  You were downvoted because your claims were not substantiated by factual analysis. Rather, your comment seemed rather "tribal" while criticizing Rust fans of the same.
  - discoball 8y ago
    True.
    - the_duke 8y ago
      Cheers for owning up to it. BTW, I would see Nim more as a competitor to D, Swift and Java than to Rust.
      - kungtotte 8y ago
        I think Nim absolutely has a place competing with Rust too. It has several tunable GCs allowing for great flexibility there, and also supports running with no GC at all. It compiles to C that will compile nearly anywhere C does. It produces smaller binaries, and it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint. It's also safe like Rust is, and the compiler will help you catch a ton of errors. That's not to say that it's competitive at this point in time. It's much more unstable as a language due to not reaching 1.0 yet. They only just (August) received any real kind of funding, allowing them to hire on a new developer but it's still just a handful of core devs and some dedicated contributors. The standard library and the community repo (Nimble) can't compare with Rust's and Cargo in terms of package availability and support.
        bluejekyll 8y ago
        > it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint I'm not sure if you were implying that it doesn't, but Rust also supports musl: $> rustup target list | rg musl aarch64-unknown-linux-musl arm-unknown-linux-musleabi arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf armv5te-unknown-linux-musleabi armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf i586-unknown-linux-musl i686-unknown-linux-musl mips-unknown-linux-musl mipsel-unknown-linux-musl powerpc64le-unknown-linux-musl x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
        kungtotte 8y ago
        I apologize if I worded my post weirdly. It was a list of things that make Nim a competitor to Rust, not things that Nim does that Rust doesn't. There's a fair bit of overlap for obvious reasons: they're two languages suited for the same tasks, after all :)
- Majestic121 8y ago
  I think you're getting downvote because you're being very tribal about Nim, and apparently not open for discussion : "It's a win over Rust in every way including ease of use." You can paint others opinion as being subjective, which they are, but you would be wise to realize yours are as well. That's what's bringing hostility, not the diversity of viewpoint (there's a lot of talks about Go in the thread for example)
  - discoball 8y ago
    Yes, true.
- OpenBSD-reich 8y ago
  It's the systemd of languages, in that it solves problems already solved and is heavily evangelized as the best thing since sliced bread.
dom96 8y ago
> The Rust borrow checker prevents a lot of issues in C(++) code. Including thread safety. Nim does not provide anything new in this regard. Actually Nim does offer something new in this regard. See https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#guards-and-locks https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#guards-and-locks. > While Mozilla support does help a lot for sure, a lot of the hype around Rust (imo) comes from people trying it out, just falling in love with and then promoting it AFAIK Rust was a much different language before Mozilla officially adopted it (wasn't the borrow checker implemented after Mozilla sponsorship?). So not only was it not the same language, it wasn't known at all. Don't underestimate the power of full-time developers working on a programming language and having the support of a well known organisation behind them. Sadly a lot of the hype is simply "omg, Mozilla uses this langauge" or "omg, Google uses this language".
- tathougies 8y ago
  Nim is garbage collected, which means it doesn't need borrow checking. Garbage collection in threaded languages is a well studied problem. Safe threading in a statically collected language is new.
- imtringued 8y ago
  This is clearly a better solution compared to the average language but what if you forget to mark a field or object as guarded? Just take a look at the basic problem of multi-threading: two threads write to the same memory location. This situation is unpredictable and there never allowed to happen. There are three general strategies to deal with this: immutability, mutexes and linear types to ensure there is only one reference with write capability. The latter makes writing code that is not thread-safe impossible at compile time without sacrificing efficiency and is used by at least two programming languages that I know of: Ponylang and Rust. For me impossible vs "oops forgot to guard it" are worlds apart. The compiler will inform you that it is not thread-safe and then you can decide to use a different solution like a mutex if necessary.

discoball 8y ago

<< While Mozilla support does help a lot for sure, a lot of the hype around Rust (imo) comes from people trying it out, just falling in love with and then promoting it >> If there was no rampant tribalism, my comment would not be buried with negative votes. It would receive a response like the one you gave, which is subjective, and that would be the end of it. Some may even up-vote it because diversity is always good. But feels like Rust users are zealous and it's a bad sign, tbh. Wouldn't want to be part of a community that acted with hostility towards others for presenting alternative view points.

the_duke 8y ago
You were downvoted because your claims were not substantiated by factual analysis. Rather, your comment seemed rather "tribal" while criticizing Rust fans of the same.
- discoball 8y ago
  True.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Cheers for owning up to it. BTW, I would see Nim more as a competitor to D, Swift and Java than to Rust.
    - kungtotte 8y ago
      I think Nim absolutely has a place competing with Rust too. It has several tunable GCs allowing for great flexibility there, and also supports running with no GC at all. It compiles to C that will compile nearly anywhere C does. It produces smaller binaries, and it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint. It's also safe like Rust is, and the compiler will help you catch a ton of errors. That's not to say that it's competitive at this point in time. It's much more unstable as a language due to not reaching 1.0 yet. They only just (August) received any real kind of funding, allowing them to hire on a new developer but it's still just a handful of core devs and some dedicated contributors. The standard library and the community repo (Nimble) can't compare with Rust's and Cargo in terms of package availability and support.
      - bluejekyll 8y ago
        > it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint I'm not sure if you were implying that it doesn't, but Rust also supports musl: $> rustup target list | rg musl aarch64-unknown-linux-musl arm-unknown-linux-musleabi arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf armv5te-unknown-linux-musleabi armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf i586-unknown-linux-musl i686-unknown-linux-musl mips-unknown-linux-musl mipsel-unknown-linux-musl powerpc64le-unknown-linux-musl x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
        kungtotte 8y ago
        I apologize if I worded my post weirdly. It was a list of things that make Nim a competitor to Rust, not things that Nim does that Rust doesn't. There's a fair bit of overlap for obvious reasons: they're two languages suited for the same tasks, after all :)
Majestic121 8y ago
I think you're getting downvote because you're being very tribal about Nim, and apparently not open for discussion : "It's a win over Rust in every way including ease of use." You can paint others opinion as being subjective, which they are, but you would be wise to realize yours are as well. That's what's bringing hostility, not the diversity of viewpoint (there's a lot of talks about Go in the thread for example)
- discoball 8y ago
  Yes, true.
OpenBSD-reich 8y ago
It's the systemd of languages, in that it solves problems already solved and is heavily evangelized as the best thing since sliced bread.

dom96 8y ago

> The Rust borrow checker prevents a lot of issues in C(++) code. Including thread safety. Nim does not provide anything new in this regard. Actually Nim does offer something new in this regard. See https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#guards-and-locks https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#guards-and-locks. > While Mozilla support does help a lot for sure, a lot of the hype around Rust (imo) comes from people trying it out, just falling in love with and then promoting it AFAIK Rust was a much different language before Mozilla officially adopted it (wasn't the borrow checker implemented after Mozilla sponsorship?). So not only was it not the same language, it wasn't known at all. Don't underestimate the power of full-time developers working on a programming language and having the support of a well known organisation behind them. Sadly a lot of the hype is simply "omg, Mozilla uses this langauge" or "omg, Google uses this language".

tathougies 8y ago
Nim is garbage collected, which means it doesn't need borrow checking. Garbage collection in threaded languages is a well studied problem. Safe threading in a statically collected language is new.
imtringued 8y ago
This is clearly a better solution compared to the average language but what if you forget to mark a field or object as guarded? Just take a look at the basic problem of multi-threading: two threads write to the same memory location. This situation is unpredictable and there never allowed to happen. There are three general strategies to deal with this: immutability, mutexes and linear types to ensure there is only one reference with write capability. The latter makes writing code that is not thread-safe impossible at compile time without sacrificing efficiency and is used by at least two programming languages that I know of: Ponylang and Rust. For me impossible vs "oops forgot to guard it" are worlds apart. The compiler will inform you that it is not thread-safe and then you can decide to use a different solution like a mutex if necessary.