6 ms·

I just realized something: Nim is like a faster Python or a better Go lang It's not really competing in quite the same space as say, D or Rust. It's like a sta

• def- 12y ago
  Why would you say it's not competing with D and Rust? Performance-wise Nim should be in the same ball-park, and you can do systems programming in it. For me Nim is a universal language which I can use for almost anything.
  • Rusky 12y ago
    D maybe, since it has a GC, but Rust not as much. A lot of defaults are different, affecting how libraries and idiomatic code are written and what situations it can be used in without turning things off or avoiding features.
  • iopq 12y ago
    Rust is where you can write code that relies on a custom allocator. Or a program that doesn't allocate memory. It's usable for the really low level stuff. Because of this everything must be explicit. Nim is implicit. It doesn't require you to declare a main() function, for example.
  • pcwalton 12y ago
    Nim does not have the memory safety without garbage collection features of Rust. If you want memory safety in Nim, you have to use the garbage collector (which, last I looked, is not thread safe either, although I see that Boehm is now an option). It's easy to write (a) an unsafe language that has no GC, or (b) a safe language that relies on GC for safety. It's also easy to write a language that is in category (b) but lets you drop down to category (a) in an unsafe dialect. It's a very difficult problem to write a safe language that does not rely on GC, and I know of no other industry language that has done it. Unfortunately, people often lump Rust into categories (a) or (b), without realizing that what makes it interesting is that it isn't in either. Nim may be in category (b) (if the thread safety issues in the GC have been solved, or you use Boehm, or your app is solely single-threaded) with the ability to drop down to category (a), but it is not in Rust's category.
    • pjmlp 12y ago
      I think it is a matter of what is safe. While Ada doesn't provide the parallelism safety mecanisms from Rust, is is pretty much a safe systems programming language, specially the SPARK dialect. And I do conceed that using RAII or memory pools is a bit more cumbersome than in Rust. EDIT: Forgot to add that for me systems programming safety has been for a long time what Modula-3, Oberon and Ada offer. Only recently it became clear to me that Rust safety module is more broad.
      • pcwalton 12y ago
        Yeah, Ada/SPARK is safe too. But as I understand it achieves that by removing deallocation (from a single untyped heap) entirely, which is pretty limiting, though sufficient for a lot of embedded work.
        • pjmlp 12y ago
          Yes in SPARK's case. In general Ada code, deallocation is considered unsafe and requires specializing the Unchecked_Deallocation() procedure. This is because Ada 83 allowed for optional GC. In Ada 83, the safe alternative was to use memory pools. With the newer revisions, support was added for RAII and Ada the ability to define custom refereced counted data structures, similar to how they are doing in C++. So speaking of Ada 2012, you can get Ada's safety in terms of contracts, data types, numeric ranges, constrained types, access types (Ada pointers). For heap related safety, it is possible if RAII, memory pools or RC access types are used. But like C++, this is one area where the compiler doesn't force the developer to use it.
• xkarga00 12y ago
  Care elaborating on why is it a better Golang?
  • S4M 12y ago
    It has generics, for once?
  • kxo 12y ago
    Without pointing out specifics: Nim has comparable ambitions to Go but Nim actually has escape hatches for people that desire "more."
  • iopq 12y ago
    Better metaprogramming, significant whitespace, generics, etc.
    • wtf_is_up 12y ago
      > significant whitespace That's not an advantage
      • msandford 12y ago
        So says you. The entire python community disagrees, and that's not an inconsiderable number of folks.
        • dragonwriter 12y ago
          No, the Python community consists of a mix of people who think that the manner in which whitespace is significant in Python (most languages have significant whitespace of some form) is advantageous, people who think it is neither advantageous nor disadvantageous that are attracted to the language for other reasons, and people who think that it is disadvantageous, but not so much as to negate other advantages they see in the language. It is a mistake to conclude that because language X has feature Y, the entire community around language X thinks that feature Y is a positive feature.
        • 12y ago
• lmm 12y ago
  Comparisons to D or OCaml would be interesting (it'd be good to see that "new language for 0install" post redone with nim as one of the candidates). I think people are shoehorning Rust into the "compiled, typesafe, but strict and impure general-purpose programming language" niche, just because there aren't as many nice options there as we'd like.
• codexon 12y ago
  There's 1 thing that can't be done in Nim that you can do in Go though. And that is the goroutine system. Something like that needs to be explicitly baked into the language. You can try to emulate it with your own thread pools but you will never get the same level of preemption. However few people will ever need this feature, and erlang/elixir probably does it better, though at a the cost of speed.
  • fenollp 12y ago
    But but but Go's concurrent scheduler just isn't preemptive. It's cooperative (and that's meh).
    • codexon 12y ago
      It is preemptive on function calls just like erlang.
• pekk 12y ago
  Nim can't be a faster Python when it isn't a Python, but a much younger language which lifts a few cosmetic choices but intentionally breaks with Python in large ways. If it is trying to replace Python, many of these breaks are poorly chosen and reflect a lack of understanding of why Python and its ancestors were unique. Aside from this, many of the practical refinements of Python are dropped in favor of fancy and shiny features that are better for arguing on HN than actually using. If I really want macros, Lisp never went away, but they aren't doing Nim's readability any favors. Go is much more mature than Nim and encapsulates a huge amount of thinking and experience in language and compiler design. Nim would like to be Go. But it isn't.
  • pekk 12y ago
    It really makes no sense that saying "Nim is better than Python" is an acceptable opinion, but "no, it isn't" is not an acceptable opinion to HN.