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>Does nim have anything as polished and performant as clap and serde? "Polished" and "high quality" are more subjective/implicitly about adoption, IMO. "Perfor

by cb321 4y ago

>Does nim have anything as polished and performant as clap and serde? "Polished" and "high quality" are more subjective/implicitly about adoption, IMO. "Performant" has many dimensions. That said, I just tested the Nim https://github.com/c-blake/cligen https://github.com/c-blake/cligen vs clap: cligen used 5X less object file space (with all size optimization tweaks enabled in both), 20% less run-time memory for large argument lists, and the same run-time per argument (with march=native equivalents on both, within statistical noise). cligen has many features - "did you mean?/suggestions", color generated help and all that - I do not see obvious feature in clap docs missing in cligen. The Nim binary serde showing is unlikely as good but there are like 10 JSON packages and that seems maybe your primary concern. More to add color your point than disagree (and follow up on my "adoption") - your ideas about polish, quality, docs, etc. are part of feedback loop(s) you mentioned. More users => Users complain (What is confusing? What is missing? etc.) => things get fixed/cleaned up/improved => More users. Besides "performant" being multi-dimensional, the feedback loop is more of a "cyclic graph". :-) Or maybe this is just a sub-graph of "ecosystem richness". While I probably prefer Nim as much or more as @netbioserror, I am not too shocked by the mindshare capture. It seems to happen every 5..10 years or so in prog.langs. While many of your points are not invalid, tech is also a highly hype-driven & fad-driven realm. In my experience, the more experience with this meta-feature that someone has, the more skeptical they are of the latest thing (more rounds of regret, etc.). Also, that feedback graph is not a pure good. Things can get too popular too quickly with near permanent consequences. ipv4 got popular so quickly that we are still mostly stuck on it 40 years later as ipv6 struggles for penetration. Whatever your favorite PL is, it may also grow features too fast.

nindalf 4y ago
Yeah, your points are valid. I think the beauty of serde is its flexibility. I can change the format from JSON to one of the other 21 supported formats with ease. We're both agreed - popularity benefits platforms in many ways. I'm not a fan of hype-driven things, unless the hype ends up making the thing more valuable. Rust is a good example - there was undoubtedly something useful there with its concept of compile time checks and memory safety with performance. It also had nice tools like cargo. But that wasn't enough. Quality alone isn't enough. Look at the adoption curve (https://lib.rs/stats https://lib.rs/stats). If it had remained as popular as it was in 2018 then it would not be something I could recommend for general purpose programming. The main criticism of Rust in 2018 was that there weren't enough libraries to do basic things. You had to write and maintain a lot of that yourself. Fortunately for Rust, the hype based around its feature set and early successes snowballed into more adoption. In 2023, hardly anyone complains about missing libraries. At most they're missing one or two, and they can write those themselves. Joining a hype train of a platform is a rational thing to do, because of the technical benefits of using a popular platform. I'm far more critical of fads in our industry where we blindly copy practices from large tech companies, like algorithmic interviews. Copying interview practices doesn't lead to shared benefits, unlike a platform. > Whatever your favorite PL is, it may also grow features too fast. For what it's worth, Rust is really conservative about adding new features. Only big features I can remember in the last 3 years is GATs, and that's a pretty nice feature. Most of the feature work is making things more consistent. For example, we can write async functions but not async trait methods. They're fixing this inconsistency now.

by cb321 4y ago

nindalf 4y ago

Yeah, your points are valid. I think the beauty of serde is its flexibility. I can change the format from JSON to one of the other 21 supported formats with ease. We're both agreed - popularity benefits platforms in many ways. I'm not a fan of hype-driven things, unless the hype ends up making the thing more valuable. Rust is a good example - there was undoubtedly something useful there with its concept of compile time checks and memory safety with performance. It also had nice tools like cargo. But that wasn't enough. Quality alone isn't enough. Look at the adoption curve (https://lib.rs/stats https://lib.rs/stats). If it had remained as popular as it was in 2018 then it would not be something I could recommend for general purpose programming. The main criticism of Rust in 2018 was that there weren't enough libraries to do basic things. You had to write and maintain a lot of that yourself. Fortunately for Rust, the hype based around its feature set and early successes snowballed into more adoption. In 2023, hardly anyone complains about missing libraries. At most they're missing one or two, and they can write those themselves. Joining a hype train of a platform is a rational thing to do, because of the technical benefits of using a popular platform. I'm far more critical of fads in our industry where we blindly copy practices from large tech companies, like algorithmic interviews. Copying interview practices doesn't lead to shared benefits, unlike a platform. > Whatever your favorite PL is, it may also grow features too fast. For what it's worth, Rust is really conservative about adding new features. Only big features I can remember in the last 3 years is GATs, and that's a pretty nice feature. Most of the feature work is making things more consistent. For example, we can write async functions but not async trait methods. They're fixing this inconsistency now.