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Well, you have to combine just two of these features to leave Nim in a very small company of languages, mostly developed in the last decade. Good performance an
by zahary 12y ago
Well, you have to combine just two of these features to leave Nim in a very small company of languages, mostly developed in the last decade. Good performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum and Nim is unifying them in a single package - that's what people are excited about.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoGood performance and meta-programming ("run regular code at compile time") used to be found at the opposite ends of the programming languages spectrum Actually, Lisp has been executing regular code at compile time with good performance since the tail end of the 1980's. Maybe even before that. This is why I said "everything old is new again."
- zahary 12y agoDepends on your definition of "good performance". Idiomatic lisp was never able to compete with the Fortran-s and C/C++-s of its age, but Nim is.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago"Good performance": Within a factor of ~2 to ~4 of native C. No one said idiomatic Lisp was performant. They said Lisp was performant. Seriously, it's not even difficult. It's not like it's a situation where it's easy to accidentally kill your performance by writing elegant code while having no idea why it's slow. Optimizing a Lisp codebase is a straightforward exercise, no more difficult than optimizing a Lua or Javascript codebase. If someone hasn't shipped more than a toy program with Lisp, it's easy to believe the opposite. But if you try it, you'll see that it's true.