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For me the feature that makes Rust stand out is memory safety without garbage collection. It's got all the goodness you'd expect from a modern programming langu

by simias 12y ago

For me the feature that makes Rust stand out is memory safety without garbage collection. It's got all the goodness you'd expect from a modern programming language while giving me basically all the flexibility I could get from writing C or C++. That's a very strong differencing trait, at least for me. I've never used Nim and I should probably give it a try but it seems that the "garbage collected, parallel oriented" niche is somewhat more cluttered with the likes of Go, the various languages built on top of .Net or the JVM, the lisps, the haskells... Not all target exactly the same use cases but there's a lot of overlap here and it's harder to stand out.

vbit 12y ago
There is nothing quite like Nim in the other languages you mention. Nim's GC is different than most of the others and you can also control it so it only runs for a certain amount of time. Nim is also very expressive and clean. The meta-programming capabilities are fantastic. Its overhead is significantly lower than the JVM and it is cross platform (unlike .net).
- eonil 12y ago
  I think Nim author need to documentate/explain/illustrate a lot more about its GC. I once have interested in Nim, but I couldn't figure out how its GC is proper (predictable & deterministic rather than throughput) to RT apps. And that dropped my interest on it. I believe this is a biggest obstacle to RT app programmers to take interest on Nim. Nowadays the term "GC" almost implies "tracing GC", so "non-tracing GC" need to be well explained. Or need to adapt some new term to explain new concept. Currently, Nim's GC explanation just looks like incremental RTGC that is not really attractive to existing RT app programmers.
  - dom96 12y ago
    Have you taken a look at the GC documentation (http://nim-lang.org/gc.html http://nim-lang.org/gc.html)?
klibertp 12y ago
Nim is different. Advanced but pragmatic type system, macros, native compilation, tiny runtime, good C interop - no language I know of offers quite the same set of features. I was very pleasantly surprised with it and decided to keep it as an "tiny, expressive, natively-compiled" solution in my toolbox.

by simias 12y ago

vbit 12y ago

There is nothing quite like Nim in the other languages you mention. Nim's GC is different than most of the others and you can also control it so it only runs for a certain amount of time. Nim is also very expressive and clean. The meta-programming capabilities are fantastic. Its overhead is significantly lower than the JVM and it is cross platform (unlike .net).

eonil 12y ago
I think Nim author need to documentate/explain/illustrate a lot more about its GC. I once have interested in Nim, but I couldn't figure out how its GC is proper (predictable & deterministic rather than throughput) to RT apps. And that dropped my interest on it. I believe this is a biggest obstacle to RT app programmers to take interest on Nim. Nowadays the term "GC" almost implies "tracing GC", so "non-tracing GC" need to be well explained. Or need to adapt some new term to explain new concept. Currently, Nim's GC explanation just looks like incremental RTGC that is not really attractive to existing RT app programmers.
- dom96 12y ago
  Have you taken a look at the GC documentation (http://nim-lang.org/gc.html http://nim-lang.org/gc.html)?

klibertp 12y ago

Nim is different. Advanced but pragmatic type system, macros, native compilation, tiny runtime, good C interop - no language I know of offers quite the same set of features. I was very pleasantly surprised with it and decided to keep it as an "tiny, expressive, natively-compiled" solution in my toolbox.