9 ms·

Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released

199 points by def- 12y ago

Koziolek 12y ago
LOL... net-filters in my job mark this site as porn...
- irishcoffee 12y ago
  I don't know why you got downvoted, same thing happened to me.
  - dom96 12y ago
    Perhaps if he didn't start his comment with "LOL" it wouldn't have been downvoted. That said, somebody on IRC mentioned that the website is blocked on Norwegian train's wifi so perhaps this problem is widespread. Any ideas where these blocking services get their black lists?
    - irishcoffee 12y ago
      At my location, it looks like this is the service: http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp?url=http://nim-lang.org/news.html http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp?url=http://nim...
      - dom96 12y ago
        Thank you. I submitted a request to review it again. Might help if you do the same. Edit: They reclassified it, should be unblocked now.
    - owtM 12y ago
      I'm curious, what's wrong with "LOL"? I thought that was the universally accepted way of expressing amusement on the Internet? Would "haha" have been more appropriate on HN or is expressing amusement generally frowned upon? I apologize for being ignorant of this matter. I'm not quite yet acquintated with proper self-censorship protocols necessary to communicate on this site. It seems rather strict but I honestly don't find that to be a problem as long as the cultural rules are well defined. As for the topic at hand: I beleive nim, nimrod, are key words that might be flagged for inappropriate content. They are similar to "nimph", "nimphomaniac", etc.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
def- 12y ago
The release is happening today, so I posted a bit early. Some parts, like the binaries, are not online yet. There are tutorials for newcomers: http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html https://nim-by-example.github.io/ https://nim-by-example.github.io/ Edit: Fixed tutorial link
- gfasdgsfd 12y ago
  I'd like to clarify that http://nimbuild.nim-lang.org/tut1.html http://nimbuild.nim-lang.org/tut1.html is for the devel branch. You probably want to use http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html if you're going to use the newly released version.
- commentzorro 12y ago
  First, congratulations on the new version. Been playing since 0.9.2 and I hope to try this latest version too. But, please make a zipped portable version available for Windows. You don't have to include a binary version of Nim (although that would be nice) but do put the required MinGW pieces off a subdirectory under Nim as was done with earlier releases. This allows unzipping to a thumb drive, xcopy installs, and using Nim anywhere without having to permanently install on specific systems. Also, it makes things really easy for a quick demo when showing someone else Nim on their machine. (FWIW: The sad state of Windows is that almost every installer out there, MinGW included, means crapping in your system to some extent and never knowing what went on nor being able to removed all traces of what was installed. With each installed application you have to make a conscious decision whether it's worth the unpredictable OS pollution to install the application on a particular machine ... because you know with each install that your headed to that inevitable last one where you have to wipe the entire OS and start over.)
  - gfasdgsfd 12y ago
    It looks like mingw provides a non-installer version of the binaries, although it is (unintentionally) well hidden in the web. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%20Win64/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/4.9.2/threads-posix/seh/x86_64-4.9.2-release-posix-seh-rt_v3-rev1.7z/download http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%2...
audunw 12y ago
Nim is very exciting to me. For a long time I've wanted to develop a viable HDL as an internal DSL in a modern imperative compiled language. Until I found Nim I couldn't find anything beyond C++ that would work (Julia might actually, I haven't tried yet), but Nim is just absolutely perfect. The custom operators, static params (a weak form of dependent typing), and the macros in particular makes Nim a perfect match. It also helps that the compiler is itself written in Nim and pretty easy to work with. It's exciting when a language allows you to solve a whole new problem that was just not feasible before.
themartorana 12y ago
All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its speed of execution. Thanks in advance for the help!
- qznc 12y ago
  There is no technical reason why Rust should be slower than Nim, as far as I know.
  - def- 12y ago
    Nim has the advantage of compiling to/through C, for which compilers have been optimized for a long time.
    - jgallag8 12y ago
      Rust uses LLVM, I believe, and LLVM does as good a job optimizing as just about anything else out there.
    - simias 12y ago
      Rust uses LLVM as a backend so it gets similar optimization passes as clang for instance, so it's not so different. Basically rustc generates LLVM IR where Nim generates C, apparently. In most of the benchmarks I've seen so far you could expect similar performances between C and Rust. Not to start a language flamewar but I'd like to see hard numbers before I believe that in the general case Nim is faster than Rust.
      - dom96 12y ago
        Have you seen these benchmarks? https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/writeup.md https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/writeu...
waterlesscloud 12y ago
Why did they change the name?
- untothebreach 12y ago
  I wondered the same thing, but this is all I have been able to find on reasons for the name change: http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/561#3012 http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/561#3012
- bane 12y ago
  Nimrod is a terrible name for a language. In North America it's synonymous with "idiot".
  - kachnuv_ocasek 12y ago
    Git (albeit not a language) has a similar meaning in the UK.
    - k__ 12y ago
      Which makes Github the Moron Central. ;)
    - Amezarak 12y ago
      Even in the US, "git" means "idiot." It was my understanding Linus called Git for the same reason Mercurial is called Mercurial: as an unflattering reference to Larry McVoy, who was involved in the Linux/Bitkeeper mess. While typing this though, I discovered that Linux apparently denies this and says it's self-reference. ("I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git'".) Nimrod is actually a little interesting. Until the 1980s, Nimrod was just a Biblical figure, a powerful king/great hunter figure. Possibly because it was used in an ironic sense for bad hunters (perhaps beginning with Elmer Fudd), it came to mean the opposite of its original sense and generalized to "idiot." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nimrod http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nimrod EDIT: Sorry about that...I accidentally said Perforce instead of BitKeeper. Perforce on the brain. :) Thanks nocman.
logicchains 12y ago
Something I find quite interesting about Nim is write tracking: http://nim-lang.org/blog/writetracking.html http://nim-lang.org/blog/writetracking.html. It uses the language's effect system, and allows not only specifying for instance that a function is referentially transparent, but also specifying how an impure function accesses or modifies global state. An example from the above link: var gId = 0 proc genId(): natural {.writes: [gId].} = gId += 1 return gId To quote the article: "Here the effect systems shows its strength: Imagine there was a genId2 that writes to some other global variable; then genId and genId2 can be executed in parallel even though they are not free of side effects!" The effect system can also be used for exception tracking, specifying what kind of exceptions are function may throw. It can moreover be extended to work with user-defined effects.
- chipsy 12y ago
  A lot of features in Nim show a similar kind of designed pragmatism. It's big, and has a lot of stuff that you just won't use in everyday situations, but the uncommon features tend to hit really specific engineering problems that do come up in the real world. I like it a lot better than what I see coming out of Rust, at least at this moment.
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  Out of curiosity: why is it hard for compilers to keep track of this automatically? At least, my gut feeling says that if it had been easy to do, this would be a solved design problem in newly developed languages by now - at least the statically compiled ones like Nim.
  - uhno 12y ago
    For simple cases (such as the example in the GP comment) a compiler can easily infer those annotations. Complications are introduced in languages which allow aliasing. Precise alias analysis has been shown to be NP-hard [1] (as are many other compiler problems), and thus in general compilers must make very pessimistic assumptions to avoid making incorrect optimizations, such as allowing two functions to execute in parallel. Other issues crop up due to the open-world assumption. This is especially true in the presence of separate compilation when trying to reason about global behavior. Example: does function f() in file f.c modify global variable g in file g.c? The compiler may not be able to prove that one way or another at compile-time (consider if file f.c was already compiled to object code f.o, and only g.c was being recompiled), and so it must assume that f() may modify g. This particular example can be solved with link-time optimization, but you get the idea of how complicated the real world can get. [1] Horwitz, "Precise flow-insensitive may-alias analysis is NP-hard," TOPLAS 1997.
copx 12y ago
>The unpopular "T" and "P" prefixes on types have been deprecated I really like that change. Those always looked so archaic to me.
ebbv 12y ago
Maybe it's just me but I find this language pretty ugly. And regardless of any technical advantages it may offer, that's enough reason to not use it. There's too many languages out there to come out with a new one where the code isn't clean and nice.
- vbit 12y ago
  Care to give an example of a language you find beautiful?
  - ebbv 12y ago
    First, I have never and probably would never use the word "beautiful" to describe any code. I purposefully chose "clean and nice" in my last comment. As far as the new crop of languages go, I think Rust and Go both offer better refinements of older languages than Nim does. If you're going to come out with a new language, the syntax of it should be cleaner and easier to read than what you are replacing (in this case, seemingly C/C++/Java) or there's not much point. But ultimately this is personal preference, which is why I worded my comment that way. Instead of people simply disagreeing they have so far down voted me to -3 and counting. HN is overrun with a groupthink mob lately. I have tested this on a number of occasions posting comments that I knew were pandering to the mob, and today posting one I thought probably would go against the grain and the results are totally predictable. It's very sad.
    - andybak 12y ago
      I'm not saying the downvote was warranted but your original comment wasn't exactly in-depth and high-quality. It was a bit lazy and off-hand. The only reason I bothered to engage with you is because I find language aesthetics fascinating and wanted to find out what your beef was.
      - ebbv 12y ago
        Brief is not the same as lazy. I personally find comments that say what they mean to say in a short amount of text much more useful than ones that go on for paragraphs without saying anything new. I strive for brevity. I revised the one you responded to so you may want to check that now. As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: echo("Hello world!") To be outdated and ugly. I also find the case statement to be awful to read the way they've done it, I far prefer the set of cases to be indented from the case statement itself. And the "of" on each line is redundant cruft. This is a brand new language and it holds on to what to my eyes is the worst cruft of old languages.
bsaul 12y ago
Anyone knows what kind of project would nim be a good choice for at the moment ? I mean both the language feature as well as available libs. I think i've read somewhere that web server coding isn't a target yet (at least regarding websockets use, which was my primary concern at the time i looked).
- dom96 12y ago
  It's definitely a good time to get started with web server coding. While a websockets Nimble package is still not available there is a good excuse to write one now that the new async await support is implemented. As far as web frameworks go I have written one called Jester (https://github.com/dom96/jester https://github.com/dom96/jester). I'll be releasing version 0.1.0 of it soon.
- Symmetry 12y ago
  Well, I'm going to be starting on a project involving Arduino and pretty LEDs soon. Being able to do do stuff like when version == A const numLeds = 10 type LedArray = array[LedState, numLeds] And then have the number of Leds and the size of the array being passed around typechecked and having all of this done at compile time seems really interesting and useful. And it seems easy to just allocate everything statically or on the stack and then turn off the garbage collector.
  - dom96 12y ago
    Please announce it on the forum once you get it working. I am considering buying an Arduino and seeing this in Nim would certainly push me to buy it!
cryofan 12y ago
what a nimrod
JasonFruit 12y ago
So far, Nim has passed the most basic test for me: it installs according to instructions and compiles its own example code. I'm always baffled by the number of language releases that don't reliably do that. Nim looks like a worthwhile language, and I'm looking forward to learning it.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  Good for you! When I tried the test last week, the installation instruction was outdated, so that became my first contribution to Nim. :) I suspect most of your baffling cases are simply the case of outdated documentation.
  - JasonFruit 12y ago
    Right — and that's what baffles me. If you want people to adopt your language, you certainly want to have your documentation of the very first step be complete and up-to-date. Thank you for making sure that is the case with Nim.
infinite8s 12y ago
Can someone give a succinct description of the difference between Nim and Rust?
- wbhart 12y ago
  Nim has the feel of a compiled Python (with many additional features that Python is lacking). It is garbage collected, is designed to look as pseudocode'ish as possible. Rust is designed for systems projects where GC is not a good idea, such as web browsers, or kernels, etc. One of its core design philosophies is to manage memory safely and efficiently.
  - dom96 12y ago
    To add to that: While Nim is garbage collected primarily it can also be used without a GC. However, the many scenarios where going GC-less may be beneficial such as games, web browsers, or kernels where the application cannot afford any pauses during runtime is alleviated by the real-time aspect of Nim's GC which allows you to specify exactly when and for how long you would like it to run (http://nim-lang.org/gc.html http://nim-lang.org/gc.html). In this sense Nim is betting on you using the GC for those applications whereas Rust is betting on not using a GC and providing you with tools to manage your memory manually more safely.
fithisux 12y ago
Hopefully one day the freepascal backend gets updated. There is a lot of Pascal/Delphi code out there that can benefit (rewritten and call legacy pascal) from Nim's improvements.
- dom96 12y ago
  Perhaps that day will come. This project was recently started https://github.com/Araq/nim2pas https://github.com/Araq/nim2pas
ldlework 12y ago
As a long time Python programmer who has struggled to cross the gap from dynamic scripting languages to modern statically typed languages Nim is by far the most frictionless language I have tried. Before I found Nim I longed for a language like C# where the generics "just work" and overall the language just feels like it designed at-once rather than piecemeal overtime. Everything just seem really "nice" in C# and I am able to transfer my Python experience over to it. But being locked up to .NET/Mono I never really used it outside of Unity3D. I tried Golang, because it was sold to me as something I would love since I am a long time Python developer. I strongly dislike Golang. It doesn't have much in the way of letting me model my programs like I am used to. I am told "that's wrong, do it the Go way". This is too much friction. Once I am done thinking how to solve my problem algorithmically, I do not want to then figure out how to rethink my algorithm just for the sake of the maintainer's of Golang. I tried Rust. I think Rust is beautiful (mostly). However, Rust has a far too fundamentalist view on memory safety. And that's not to downplay the importance of memory safety. But there's just too much friction. I want to sit down an implement my algorithm. I don't want to stop and spend just as much time thinking about the particulars that Rust demands. When I found Nim I almost couldn't believe it. The core language was simple, clean and immediately absorbable. I was able to start writing basic Nim programs after just perusing the language docs for a few minutes while the compiler compiled. I read that Nim had powerful meta-programming facilities and this started to turn me off. I had heard that macros were generally a negative force in the world but only knew them from Lisp. Then I learned that Nim's macros are just functions that take and AST tree, perform modifications to that AST and return an AST tree. Wow that's pretty simple. Oh hey the generics "just work" like in C#. Woah, Nim even supports inheritance! Nim is definitely the next language for me. In thinking about it, I find that I agree with one of Jonathon Blow's sentiments that we have been seeing a number of new up and coming languages but they are all Big Idea languages. Big Idea languages who's ideas have yet to be vetted and proved out over the course of a decade or two. They all incur too much friction. Nim seems like a competent, low-level systems language with a helpful repertoire of well-implemented modern tunings to features that are all mostly established in the field. It doesn't try to revolutionize systems languages. It tries to bring us a modern refinement by bringing us a highly performant yet relentlessly productive take on what has already been shown to work. Please don't be offended if you see me around evangelizing its existence.
emmanueloga_ 12y ago
Is the JavaScript back-end receiving any updates? Last time I looked at it it looked like it was lagging behind (emphasis in "looked like", I did not spend too much time with it).

199 points by def- 12y ago

Koziolek 12y ago

LOL... net-filters in my job mark this site as porn...

irishcoffee 12y ago
I don't know why you got downvoted, same thing happened to me.
- dom96 12y ago
  Perhaps if he didn't start his comment with "LOL" it wouldn't have been downvoted. That said, somebody on IRC mentioned that the website is blocked on Norwegian train's wifi so perhaps this problem is widespread. Any ideas where these blocking services get their black lists?
  - irishcoffee 12y ago
    At my location, it looks like this is the service: http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp?url=http://nim-lang.org/news.html http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp?url=http://nim...
    - dom96 12y ago
      Thank you. I submitted a request to review it again. Might help if you do the same. Edit: They reclassified it, should be unblocked now.
  - owtM 12y ago
    I'm curious, what's wrong with "LOL"? I thought that was the universally accepted way of expressing amusement on the Internet? Would "haha" have been more appropriate on HN or is expressing amusement generally frowned upon? I apologize for being ignorant of this matter. I'm not quite yet acquintated with proper self-censorship protocols necessary to communicate on this site. It seems rather strict but I honestly don't find that to be a problem as long as the cultural rules are well defined. As for the topic at hand: I beleive nim, nimrod, are key words that might be flagged for inappropriate content. They are similar to "nimph", "nimphomaniac", etc.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

def- 12y ago

The release is happening today, so I posted a bit early. Some parts, like the binaries, are not online yet. There are tutorials for newcomers: http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html https://nim-by-example.github.io/ https://nim-by-example.github.io/ Edit: Fixed tutorial link

gfasdgsfd 12y ago
I'd like to clarify that http://nimbuild.nim-lang.org/tut1.html http://nimbuild.nim-lang.org/tut1.html is for the devel branch. You probably want to use http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html if you're going to use the newly released version.
commentzorro 12y ago
First, congratulations on the new version. Been playing since 0.9.2 and I hope to try this latest version too. But, please make a zipped portable version available for Windows. You don't have to include a binary version of Nim (although that would be nice) but do put the required MinGW pieces off a subdirectory under Nim as was done with earlier releases. This allows unzipping to a thumb drive, xcopy installs, and using Nim anywhere without having to permanently install on specific systems. Also, it makes things really easy for a quick demo when showing someone else Nim on their machine. (FWIW: The sad state of Windows is that almost every installer out there, MinGW included, means crapping in your system to some extent and never knowing what went on nor being able to removed all traces of what was installed. With each installed application you have to make a conscious decision whether it's worth the unpredictable OS pollution to install the application on a particular machine ... because you know with each install that your headed to that inevitable last one where you have to wipe the entire OS and start over.)
- gfasdgsfd 12y ago
  It looks like mingw provides a non-installer version of the binaries, although it is (unintentionally) well hidden in the web. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%20Win64/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/4.9.2/threads-posix/seh/x86_64-4.9.2-release-posix-seh-rt_v3-rev1.7z/download http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%2...

audunw 12y ago

Nim is very exciting to me. For a long time I've wanted to develop a viable HDL as an internal DSL in a modern imperative compiled language. Until I found Nim I couldn't find anything beyond C++ that would work (Julia might actually, I haven't tried yet), but Nim is just absolutely perfect. The custom operators, static params (a weak form of dependent typing), and the macros in particular makes Nim a perfect match. It also helps that the compiler is itself written in Nim and pretty easy to work with. It's exciting when a language allows you to solve a whole new problem that was just not feasible before.

themartorana 12y ago

All the hype on HN seems to be towards Rust and Go (with Go having its share of haters), but Nim sounds particularly interesting as a side-step from Python that runs faster than both Go and Rust. Can anyone give me some insight as to why it's not as hyped, if at all? I'm rather unfamiliar with Nim, and it's seems to have a smaller community, but it feels like it should be getting all sorts of love considering its speed of execution. Thanks in advance for the help!

qznc 12y ago
There is no technical reason why Rust should be slower than Nim, as far as I know.
- def- 12y ago
  Nim has the advantage of compiling to/through C, for which compilers have been optimized for a long time.
  - jgallag8 12y ago
    Rust uses LLVM, I believe, and LLVM does as good a job optimizing as just about anything else out there.
  - simias 12y ago
    Rust uses LLVM as a backend so it gets similar optimization passes as clang for instance, so it's not so different. Basically rustc generates LLVM IR where Nim generates C, apparently. In most of the benchmarks I've seen so far you could expect similar performances between C and Rust. Not to start a language flamewar but I'd like to see hard numbers before I believe that in the general case Nim is faster than Rust.
    - dom96 12y ago
      Have you seen these benchmarks? https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/writeup.md https://github.com/logicchains/LPATHBench/blob/master/writeu...

waterlesscloud 12y ago

Why did they change the name?

untothebreach 12y ago
I wondered the same thing, but this is all I have been able to find on reasons for the name change: http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/561#3012 http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/561#3012
bane 12y ago
Nimrod is a terrible name for a language. In North America it's synonymous with "idiot".
- kachnuv_ocasek 12y ago
  Git (albeit not a language) has a similar meaning in the UK.
  - k__ 12y ago
    Which makes Github the Moron Central. ;)
  - Amezarak 12y ago
    Even in the US, "git" means "idiot." It was my understanding Linus called Git for the same reason Mercurial is called Mercurial: as an unflattering reference to Larry McVoy, who was involved in the Linux/Bitkeeper mess. While typing this though, I discovered that Linux apparently denies this and says it's self-reference. ("I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git'".) Nimrod is actually a little interesting. Until the 1980s, Nimrod was just a Biblical figure, a powerful king/great hunter figure. Possibly because it was used in an ironic sense for bad hunters (perhaps beginning with Elmer Fudd), it came to mean the opposite of its original sense and generalized to "idiot." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nimrod http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nimrod EDIT: Sorry about that...I accidentally said Perforce instead of BitKeeper. Perforce on the brain. :) Thanks nocman.

logicchains 12y ago

Something I find quite interesting about Nim is write tracking: http://nim-lang.org/blog/writetracking.html http://nim-lang.org/blog/writetracking.html. It uses the language's effect system, and allows not only specifying for instance that a function is referentially transparent, but also specifying how an impure function accesses or modifies global state. An example from the above link: var gId = 0 proc genId(): natural {.writes: [gId].} = gId += 1 return gId To quote the article: "Here the effect systems shows its strength: Imagine there was a genId2 that writes to some other global variable; then genId and genId2 can be executed in parallel even though they are not free of side effects!" The effect system can also be used for exception tracking, specifying what kind of exceptions are function may throw. It can moreover be extended to work with user-defined effects.

chipsy 12y ago
A lot of features in Nim show a similar kind of designed pragmatism. It's big, and has a lot of stuff that you just won't use in everyday situations, but the uncommon features tend to hit really specific engineering problems that do come up in the real world. I like it a lot better than what I see coming out of Rust, at least at this moment.
vanderZwan 12y ago
Out of curiosity: why is it hard for compilers to keep track of this automatically? At least, my gut feeling says that if it had been easy to do, this would be a solved design problem in newly developed languages by now - at least the statically compiled ones like Nim.
- uhno 12y ago
  For simple cases (such as the example in the GP comment) a compiler can easily infer those annotations. Complications are introduced in languages which allow aliasing. Precise alias analysis has been shown to be NP-hard [1] (as are many other compiler problems), and thus in general compilers must make very pessimistic assumptions to avoid making incorrect optimizations, such as allowing two functions to execute in parallel. Other issues crop up due to the open-world assumption. This is especially true in the presence of separate compilation when trying to reason about global behavior. Example: does function f() in file f.c modify global variable g in file g.c? The compiler may not be able to prove that one way or another at compile-time (consider if file f.c was already compiled to object code f.o, and only g.c was being recompiled), and so it must assume that f() may modify g. This particular example can be solved with link-time optimization, but you get the idea of how complicated the real world can get. [1] Horwitz, "Precise flow-insensitive may-alias analysis is NP-hard," TOPLAS 1997.

copx 12y ago

>The unpopular "T" and "P" prefixes on types have been deprecated I really like that change. Those always looked so archaic to me.

ebbv 12y ago

Maybe it's just me but I find this language pretty ugly. And regardless of any technical advantages it may offer, that's enough reason to not use it. There's too many languages out there to come out with a new one where the code isn't clean and nice.

vbit 12y ago
Care to give an example of a language you find beautiful?
- ebbv 12y ago
  First, I have never and probably would never use the word "beautiful" to describe any code. I purposefully chose "clean and nice" in my last comment. As far as the new crop of languages go, I think Rust and Go both offer better refinements of older languages than Nim does. If you're going to come out with a new language, the syntax of it should be cleaner and easier to read than what you are replacing (in this case, seemingly C/C++/Java) or there's not much point. But ultimately this is personal preference, which is why I worded my comment that way. Instead of people simply disagreeing they have so far down voted me to -3 and counting. HN is overrun with a groupthink mob lately. I have tested this on a number of occasions posting comments that I knew were pandering to the mob, and today posting one I thought probably would go against the grain and the results are totally predictable. It's very sad.
  - andybak 12y ago
    I'm not saying the downvote was warranted but your original comment wasn't exactly in-depth and high-quality. It was a bit lazy and off-hand. The only reason I bothered to engage with you is because I find language aesthetics fascinating and wanted to find out what your beef was.
    - ebbv 12y ago
      Brief is not the same as lazy. I personally find comments that say what they mean to say in a short amount of text much more useful than ones that go on for paragraphs without saying anything new. I strive for brevity. I revised the one you responded to so you may want to check that now. As far as more details of what I don't like about Nim, that would have been easy to ask directly; I find the syntax of: echo("Hello world!") To be outdated and ugly. I also find the case statement to be awful to read the way they've done it, I far prefer the set of cases to be indented from the case statement itself. And the "of" on each line is redundant cruft. This is a brand new language and it holds on to what to my eyes is the worst cruft of old languages.

bsaul 12y ago

Anyone knows what kind of project would nim be a good choice for at the moment ? I mean both the language feature as well as available libs. I think i've read somewhere that web server coding isn't a target yet (at least regarding websockets use, which was my primary concern at the time i looked).

dom96 12y ago
It's definitely a good time to get started with web server coding. While a websockets Nimble package is still not available there is a good excuse to write one now that the new async await support is implemented. As far as web frameworks go I have written one called Jester (https://github.com/dom96/jester https://github.com/dom96/jester). I'll be releasing version 0.1.0 of it soon.
Symmetry 12y ago
Well, I'm going to be starting on a project involving Arduino and pretty LEDs soon. Being able to do do stuff like when version == A const numLeds = 10 type LedArray = array[LedState, numLeds] And then have the number of Leds and the size of the array being passed around typechecked and having all of this done at compile time seems really interesting and useful. And it seems easy to just allocate everything statically or on the stack and then turn off the garbage collector.
- dom96 12y ago
  Please announce it on the forum once you get it working. I am considering buying an Arduino and seeing this in Nim would certainly push me to buy it!

cryofan 12y ago

what a nimrod

JasonFruit 12y ago

So far, Nim has passed the most basic test for me: it installs according to instructions and compiles its own example code. I'm always baffled by the number of language releases that don't reliably do that. Nim looks like a worthwhile language, and I'm looking forward to learning it.

sanxiyn 12y ago
Good for you! When I tried the test last week, the installation instruction was outdated, so that became my first contribution to Nim. :) I suspect most of your baffling cases are simply the case of outdated documentation.
- JasonFruit 12y ago
  Right — and that's what baffles me. If you want people to adopt your language, you certainly want to have your documentation of the very first step be complete and up-to-date. Thank you for making sure that is the case with Nim.

infinite8s 12y ago

Can someone give a succinct description of the difference between Nim and Rust?

wbhart 12y ago
Nim has the feel of a compiled Python (with many additional features that Python is lacking). It is garbage collected, is designed to look as pseudocode'ish as possible. Rust is designed for systems projects where GC is not a good idea, such as web browsers, or kernels, etc. One of its core design philosophies is to manage memory safely and efficiently.
- dom96 12y ago
  To add to that: While Nim is garbage collected primarily it can also be used without a GC. However, the many scenarios where going GC-less may be beneficial such as games, web browsers, or kernels where the application cannot afford any pauses during runtime is alleviated by the real-time aspect of Nim's GC which allows you to specify exactly when and for how long you would like it to run (http://nim-lang.org/gc.html http://nim-lang.org/gc.html). In this sense Nim is betting on you using the GC for those applications whereas Rust is betting on not using a GC and providing you with tools to manage your memory manually more safely.

fithisux 12y ago

Hopefully one day the freepascal backend gets updated. There is a lot of Pascal/Delphi code out there that can benefit (rewritten and call legacy pascal) from Nim's improvements.

dom96 12y ago
Perhaps that day will come. This project was recently started https://github.com/Araq/nim2pas https://github.com/Araq/nim2pas

ldlework 12y ago

As a long time Python programmer who has struggled to cross the gap from dynamic scripting languages to modern statically typed languages Nim is by far the most frictionless language I have tried. Before I found Nim I longed for a language like C# where the generics "just work" and overall the language just feels like it designed at-once rather than piecemeal overtime. Everything just seem really "nice" in C# and I am able to transfer my Python experience over to it. But being locked up to .NET/Mono I never really used it outside of Unity3D. I tried Golang, because it was sold to me as something I would love since I am a long time Python developer. I strongly dislike Golang. It doesn't have much in the way of letting me model my programs like I am used to. I am told "that's wrong, do it the Go way". This is too much friction. Once I am done thinking how to solve my problem algorithmically, I do not want to then figure out how to rethink my algorithm just for the sake of the maintainer's of Golang. I tried Rust. I think Rust is beautiful (mostly). However, Rust has a far too fundamentalist view on memory safety. And that's not to downplay the importance of memory safety. But there's just too much friction. I want to sit down an implement my algorithm. I don't want to stop and spend just as much time thinking about the particulars that Rust demands. When I found Nim I almost couldn't believe it. The core language was simple, clean and immediately absorbable. I was able to start writing basic Nim programs after just perusing the language docs for a few minutes while the compiler compiled. I read that Nim had powerful meta-programming facilities and this started to turn me off. I had heard that macros were generally a negative force in the world but only knew them from Lisp. Then I learned that Nim's macros are just functions that take and AST tree, perform modifications to that AST and return an AST tree. Wow that's pretty simple. Oh hey the generics "just work" like in C#. Woah, Nim even supports inheritance! Nim is definitely the next language for me. In thinking about it, I find that I agree with one of Jonathon Blow's sentiments that we have been seeing a number of new up and coming languages but they are all Big Idea languages. Big Idea languages who's ideas have yet to be vetted and proved out over the course of a decade or two. They all incur too much friction. Nim seems like a competent, low-level systems language with a helpful repertoire of well-implemented modern tunings to features that are all mostly established in the field. It doesn't try to revolutionize systems languages. It tries to bring us a modern refinement by bringing us a highly performant yet relentlessly productive take on what has already been shown to work. Please don't be offended if you see me around evangelizing its existence.

emmanueloga_ 12y ago

Is the JavaScript back-end receiving any updates? Last time I looked at it it looked like it was lagging behind (emphasis in "looked like", I did not spend too much time with it).