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I've vaguely heard of Nim in the past and for some reason always thought it was some limited scripting language. But this looks like a pretty serious candidate

by warent 5y ago

I've vaguely heard of Nim in the past and for some reason always thought it was some limited scripting language. But this looks like a pretty serious candidate for a nice backend language. I'm getting tired of how cumbersome Go is and have had my eye on Crystal. Anyone have any insight on how Nim stacks up to Crystal?

nerdponx 5y ago
I have written toy programs in Nim and Crystal, and the Nim experience is much more polished. The Nim compiler is as fast as the Crystal compiler is slow! I think Crystal is more enjoyable to use, personally. I am not a Ruby programmer, but Crystal just somehow feels fun to use. Nim by contrast feels very utilitarian, and frankly more practical. I found the Nim language documentation better than Crystal, the Crystal standard library docs are just as good as Nim. Nim overall feels like an "early 1.0-ish" language. Crystal feels like they went to 1.0 m too early. I would probably consider using Nim in a medium-sized application for work, whereas I wouldn't feel comfortable with Crystal for more than a personal hobby project. They do have some things in common (macros, C interop, static types), but aren't really similar languages. I used to lump them together in my head as "those two new languages", but I don't anymore after trying them both. If you are checking out new-ish languages, I hear Kotlin has some good design decisions that people appreciate (but that the tooling is pretty bad outside of Jetbrains IDEs).
- rickstanley 5y ago
  There's Kotlin script if I recall correctly. But not that developed yet nor easy to use outside jetbrains ecosystem (IDEA).
ajusa 5y ago
In case you want a quick example of a backend application in Nim, I've written a small post[1] describing how to create a room based chat using it and HTMX. In total, it's around 70 lines of code (though it doesn't cover more advanced use cases, like username collision). I too have moved from Go to Nim, the syntax and ease in which I can turn a feature into code has been much better. [1]: https://arhamjain.com/2021/11/22/nim-simple-chat.html https://arhamjain.com/2021/11/22/nim-simple-chat.html

by warent 5y ago

nerdponx 5y ago

I have written toy programs in Nim and Crystal, and the Nim experience is much more polished. The Nim compiler is as fast as the Crystal compiler is slow! I think Crystal is more enjoyable to use, personally. I am not a Ruby programmer, but Crystal just somehow feels fun to use. Nim by contrast feels very utilitarian, and frankly more practical. I found the Nim language documentation better than Crystal, the Crystal standard library docs are just as good as Nim. Nim overall feels like an "early 1.0-ish" language. Crystal feels like they went to 1.0 m too early. I would probably consider using Nim in a medium-sized application for work, whereas I wouldn't feel comfortable with Crystal for more than a personal hobby project. They do have some things in common (macros, C interop, static types), but aren't really similar languages. I used to lump them together in my head as "those two new languages", but I don't anymore after trying them both. If you are checking out new-ish languages, I hear Kotlin has some good design decisions that people appreciate (but that the tooling is pretty bad outside of Jetbrains IDEs).

rickstanley 5y ago
There's Kotlin script if I recall correctly. But not that developed yet nor easy to use outside jetbrains ecosystem (IDEA).

ajusa 5y ago

In case you want a quick example of a backend application in Nim, I've written a small post[1] describing how to create a room based chat using it and HTMX. In total, it's around 70 lines of code (though it doesn't cover more advanced use cases, like username collision). I too have moved from Go to Nim, the syntax and ease in which I can turn a feature into code has been much better. [1]: https://arhamjain.com/2021/11/22/nim-simple-chat.html https://arhamjain.com/2021/11/22/nim-simple-chat.html