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Interesting to hear this from a Nim developer. Do you think Nim would be a good fit for what facebook needs? (Normally I don't check author's names in hacker n
by vaylian 4y ago
Interesting to hear this from a Nim developer. Do you think Nim would be a good fit for what facebook needs?
(Normally I don't check author's names in hacker news comments. But I wanted to check if this is WalterBright posting here)
- rich_sasha 4y agoThat's what crossed my mind too. C++ and Rust are heavyweight and verbose, for ultimate control over execution. I have no Go experience but it seems to prefer simple over expressive. I see that niche for Nim here: fast-ish, compiled, simple to use but also expressive.
- fwsgonzo 4y agoI added Nim support to an edge platform for that reason. I think it fits in with the others. Crucially it boils down to machine code and can be debugged with GDB.
- girvo 4y agoSame reason we’re using Nim for our IoT sensor platforms firmware: it just boils down to C, so we don’t have to give up driver support or rewrite ESP-IDF from scratch.
- dom96 4y agoYep, I also just left Meta/Facebook after 4 years working there. I did spend some of my time trying to see where Nim could fit (together with a few other folks that liked Nim at FB), the best area we could come up with was CLI tools that interfaced with many internal C++ libraries. Nim would be a great replacement for Python here (it's fast and typed) and its ability to compile to C++ makes interfacing with C++ super simple (at least in theory). It is true that Nim has the same problem as D to a certain extent: the ecosystem is limited and the benefit it brings over C++ just doesn't overcome that. A great example of this is why I said "in theory" above, in practice interfacing with C++ in Nim just hasn't been done enough to be mature. Multiple teams in a FAANG aren't going to take a risk adopting that.