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Why Use Nim over C#?
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y agoThere are literally millions of professional developers using C#. Any problem you run into has a solution documented online. Languages like Nim are a good choice for developers who need the adrenaline rush of dealing with complicated problems alone.
- oynqr 4y agoDamn, didn't know C# can solve the halting problem.
- osivat 4y agoOf course it can, this simple feature has been in Visual Studio Enterprise for more than a year.
- guilhas 4y agoOne problem with the c#/dotnet ecosystem is there are too many answers online for different versions c#, records, EF6, EF core, EF7, net4.8, net standard, net core, net6, webforms, blazor, web api, web mvc, razor, identity core, legacy, UI, dotnet cli, visual studio, vscode, nuget, CMD, powershell...
- rjh29 4y agoWhat is better, too many options or barely any?
- guilhas 4y agoFor an experienced c#/.net it is OK, but new developers might get confused and go learn another language Nim looks very clean. But I am not sure it is ready for complex production work
- koenvdb 4y agoMost of the time the answers are interchangable. There are a few exceptions but then you just look for "Specific problem .Net6" for example.
- jackmott42 4y agoyou listed 3 versions of C# in that list, and they are all as similar as versions of any other language are.
- sebazzz 4y agoI bet you I'll love any library in Node.js or the ecosystem itself. That's significantly worse.
- silon42 4y agoIt's more or less true for Java... but in my experience, less true for c#.
- waldarbeiter 4y ago[flagged]
- hardware2win 4y agoBe honest with yourself CPP ecosystem is far from being sane in compare to e.g Rust.
- pictur 4y agoare you serious with this comment or is it a joke?
- hardware2win 4y agoVery serious
- bilekas 4y agoCare to elaborate further on that ? Not sure what you mean about CPP 'ecosystem' being far from sane.
- hardware2win 4y agoBilion build systems, package managers, compilers, test frameworks, etc etc You change company and you have to relearn all boring tools
- pjmlp 4y agoWhile it has lots of warts, and no matter what it won't ever be Rust like safe, Rust still has 40 years of libraries, IDEs and tooling to catch up to. And until it gets bootstrapped, it will have a dependency on C++ compiler infrastructure.
- saidinesh5 4y agoIn my experience, there's no such thing as cpp ecosystem... What there are, are many little ecosystems that revolve around various subsets of the giant language called C++. And they tend to range from quite fun to use to living nightmares/walking zombies... For eg, if you just stick to Qt/C++/QML ecosystem for making GUI/Embedded apps, the libraries are quite good, the developer tooling is quite nice, you never even leave your IDE. Infact it is nicer than what Rust has to offer for GUI today. However, if you want to make webapps/services with C++, my experience has been death by thousand cuts. I have heard similar stories from developers coming from Windows/VC++. For a lot of them, cross platform portability isn't a thing to worry about. A lot of them just store compiled dlls and header files of their dependencies in their repos etc...
- bilekas 4y ago> but i do like how nim programs consistently have few lines of code than the same program in really most other languages which seems like a good thing Interesting take.. I could share some codeGolf languages that you might like to play with in that case! That said there are a few fallacies in the comments also that bother me a bit. Specifically the assumption that 'once its closer to C its automatically more performant.' Wild comments too like : `Nim runs on many more platforms than C#` Without being specific this claim is just weird.. > beware though that usually the people who wrote the benchmarks might not be experts on Nim So you need to be an expert to benchmark it.. Red flag.
- jb1991 4y agoYou can write fast or slow code in any language, typically people who understand the language very well are the ones who can write performant code, regardless of language. All those benchmark games out there for dozens of languages are proof of that.
- kitd 4y agoNot an expert, but your comparisons need to be apples-to-apples. An expert-tuned C# impl v a naive Nim impl isn't a good benchmark.
- bilekas 4y agoIf I'm benchmarking (not perf testing) a language with some nuances I'm not too familiar with, I would stick some simple implementations of core workings. If those simple tasks are `supposed` to be done a `special` way, then I'm already not interested. Why should I need to learn semi-workarounds just to achieve the basics.
- WithinReason 4y agoHow many algorithms don't benefit from optimisations you think?
- 4y ago
- xupybd 4y agoDoes Nim really have no competition in the meta programming space? I assumed Haskell would do well there?
- jb1991 4y agoAlso zig, meta programming is one of its key features from what I understand.
- kitd 4y agoD too. D templates are dangerously easy to use.
- rakoo 4y agoruby is notorious/famous for monkeypatching everything and the simplicity of creating DSLs
- freilanzer 4y agoPresumably you're only asking about statically typed languages, right? Otherwise Julia, and every Lisp come to mind. Especially compared to Lisp all other languages are inferior when it comes to meta programming.
- francisl 4y agoswift and kotlin are slowly getting there.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 4y agoFor game dev? Use C#. It’s got all the bindings to the engines and other such things you’ll need.
- toastal 4y agoYou can use F#, but this implores that we get more engines if all they are compatible with is Microsoft .NET.
- pjmlp 4y agoAnd even then, don't forget that from .NET team's point of view, F# is a community language that gets to be on .NET SDK.
- initplus 4y agoF# is a great language, but it somewhat waters down its strengths to bolt it to a giant hulking lump of C++ full of mutable state. Interacting with an impure api means throwing out many of the advantages of (mostly) pure programming.
- DeathArrow 4y agoI currently use C# for most of my work. I would love to use Nim, as I like its design, its simplicity, its performance and the fact that it doesn't enforce OOP, but here are the problems: -not enough libraries -not enough frameworks -not enough support
- was_a_dev 4y agoClassic chicken and egg
- dmitriid 4y agoAlso known as Crossing the Chasm: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/book-summary-crossing-the-chasm-by-geoffrey-a-moore-f914a57ad02 https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/book-summary-crossing-the-chasm...
- cosmicradiance 4y agoabove 3 boils down to - not enough enterprise backing
- WithinReason 4y agoI didn't realize you can mix Nim an Assembler like this: https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/1cb6c3d/constantine/math/arithmetic/assembly/limbs_asm_mul_x86_adx_bmi2.nim#L90-L111 https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/1cb6c3d/constant...
- Santosh83 4y ago> But if you use windows, there is no inline assembly so shrug. (in Nim presumably) Can anyone say why?
- cardanome 4y agoC# is an excellent language with an great ecosystem and lots of jobs available. Also, if you ever want to go a bit more functional, F# is excellent. My personal reason for avoiding it is purely political: I don't trust Microsoft. I try to not rely on languages that are controlled by a single monopolistic corporations. Considering the recent case of the golang compiler planning on getting telemetry, I feel validated in that decision. As for game development, I think the game engine of choice will already dictate what one should learn. Unity is still king of casual and mobile games, so if that is your niche, learning C# is a no-brainer. Plus Godot has decent C# support now, if you ever need to change horses. As for more complex 3d games, Unreal 5 is just insanely good. Nanite and Lumen offer tremendous improvements in both development experience and end result. Here learning some C++ is advised but funny enough, there are actually Nim bindings as well. If you don't mind getting into somewhat untested waters, Nim might be a very good choice here.
- deafpolygon 4y ago> Considering the recent case of the golang compiler getting telemetry Is this for certain? I thought this was still in the discussion phase.
- cardanome 4y agoI should have phrased that as "planning to". After the significant push-back it seems like are considering doing only opt-in telemetry[1] which would be acceptable. So not that bad for now but who knows. Once telemetry is in place, they might try to change it to opt-out at a later date when less push-back is expected. Still setting a problematic precedent and shows why corporate control about a programming language might become problematic. [1] https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-opt-in https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-opt-in
- pjmlp 4y agoWhen those corporations not put the money into the work, even free beer C and C++ compilers suffer, see clang current state of ISO support.
- brudgers 4y ago
- scotty79 4y agoMy main reason for using C# is that's it's nice enough but Visual Studio feels amazing.
- diarrhea 4y agoI have the opposite stance. Visual Studio is my primary dislike in working with C#. It's mighty, I'll give it that. The debugging experience is strong. But it's slow, sluggish, components or itself crash sporadically; the extension ecosystem isn't great. Working with containers/docker is a bit painful, too: as with all things Microsoft, there are layers of indirection to just make it work™. While it does, it's wonderful. Almost inevitably however, one runs into edge cases that are impossible to solve, because the config you need hasn't been surfaced to the GUI. That's where I prefer more 'hackable' IDEs like VSCode. In these situations, it might just allow you to drop a line of bash into some JSON config. Simple and works, no GUI work from the devs required. One my of favorite pet peeves is running unit tests in parallel from inside VS, using the GUI/shortcuts. The setting for running unit tests in parallel is a nested setting, only accessible via GUI. Running unit tests in sequence is incredibly slow in our case (and when would you ever want unit tests _not_ run in parallel?). The setting is then stored somewhere in the `.vs/` directory, in _binary files_. You cannot version control them, and `git clean` regularly knocks that directory out, wiping the setting. Annoying, but not annoying enough to do anything about!
- _hao 4y agoI agree with you around VS and I use it all the time. The problem is that Rider for example is the same. I've had the chance to do a project with Rider recently and I have to say performance-wise both VS and Rider are just slow and prone to crashes and random errors. It's true they offer immense power. Debugging and profiling is unmatched in both IDEs. However, what I'd like is a more modular approach in both of them where I can disable certain things to take a load off the dev experience. I'm not sure if their architecture would allow for such a change, but I'd love to see it. I'm back to my usual VSCode setup now for .NET/C# work, but there even though I have more than 50 extensions, they are all enabled on per-project basis so the experience is pretty light. I still have to boot up VS/Rider from time to time, but it won't be my first choice.
- AdrianB1 4y agoStupid question of the week that came to me after reading this: is there any language that compiles to dot net intermediate language, so it runs on do net like C# but with a different syntax like Nim? There are advantages and disadvantages, I am just curious if anyone wanted to go this way.
- freilanzer 4y agoF#?
- ifdefdebug 4y agoTake a look at F#
- AdrianB1 4y agoF# is also Microsoft, is it? I am thinking about third parties that want to use the dot net ecosystem with their own languages.
- dvdkon 4y agoThere's one area where Nim is better than most alternatives, especially those with a separate required runtime, and that is binary size. I write quick scripts and daemons with Nim, knowing that they won't take up space on my disk or in RAM.
- DeathArrow 4y agoAlso, this might be an interesting read: https://mode80.github.io/7-langs-in-12-months.html https://mode80.github.io/7-langs-in-12-months.html