this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023

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[Discussion] Nim Programming language - thoughts? (nim-lang.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Anyone have experience using Nim? The TLDR that I am seeing is compiled portable python/js replacement in a way.

I was thinking about trying to write a webserver with it and was wondering if anyone had any previous experience with it.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In my experience, Nim is a language that you either fall in love with immediately or just try for a bit before going back to Rust or Python. My experience is the former, I absolutely love this language and I feel most people are missing out on it.

Honestly I don't really have anything to say about it other than it's just a lot of fun to use. It's got a great macro system, and the compile-time evaluation is the best, imo even better than Zig. It's also got a large and comprehensive standard library, so for smaller projects you don't really even need to use Nimble.

But other than that, my love for this language is mostly just "I like how you write stuff and how that stuff works." It's a great language if you need to develop fast like Python, but run fast like C. It's a language you can spend years learning the intricacies of, but pick up in a day. Nim was where a lot of programming concepts just clicked for me. It's more than just a compiled Python, and I recommend playing around with it for a bit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you so much for posting. It's really nice to hear from someone with experience first hand.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

it’s a great language if you need to develop fast like Python

I think what’s more relevant question here is what about the ecosystem? The language itself can be good, but can you create some category of software in it that is better/easier than alternatives? I suppose it would take a long time for it to have a framework as complete or well documented like Python’s Django or PHP’s Laravel etc.

When blogs or people in forums promote some less used language they often focus on some specific good thing and leave out the inconveniences and the big picture, so these are questions I’d ask before adopting a different programming language.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nim is cool. Easy to read python-like syntax, strongly typed, compiles (not transpiles) to C, so you can use common C tools like valgrind, gdb, musl, etc.
Small footprint, devel version supports deterministic gc (arc/orc).
One of the greatest interops with C, C++ or JS (C and JS are not mixable, obviously)

I've only used Nim in hobby/toy projects, but it was very pleasant experience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@janAkali I wonder how it compares to compiling Python code with https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka , which is a real compiler using C and not just a bundler. To me, from programming language perspective Nim looks like an improvement for the developer. Here is a nice overview: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programmers , but this does not take Nuitka into account.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

First time hearing about Nuitka and it sounds promising for Python devs. But from a quick glance it is merely an AOT compiled Python.
For me, Nim has big advantage over Python: types that are statically checked at compile time.
Types make you reason about your code more. Good LSP uses types to suggest you code without any AI and shows you errors before you have to run your script/programm.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

No experience yet, but It's the next language I want to try.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I've been using it for 2 years or so, mostly for hobby programming, and I really love it, it's been great for the kinds of things that I do at least :) Feels great and logical to write, and it'more or less works the same way my mind does, the type system is really good think something like Ada, and it can be both a pretty low level, and high level langauge. YMMV, but I really like it personally.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like Nim and many concepts of it with the big point of discussion being that function names get normalized (helloWorld === hello_world).

But I feel like that Nim is a language without purpose. It's all nice and cool on paper, but it has no use case where I think "I have to do it in Nim".

Go is known for making small, fast startup web apps, Python for making small one time tasks or Data work, Rust low level programming if you like functional programming, PHP if you want yo setup a website as fast as possible.

But Nim doesn't have this, it doesn't have a library that's better than in all other languages. It's nice but what for?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have to disagree with your "when use what" list. Python has production ready web backend frameworks, Rust is perfectly fine for complex and high-level software, and PHP is mostly obsolete. That's my humble opinion though. I looked into Nim and like many of the concepts. It's quite complex and I prefer Rust most of the time when Nim would be an option. I'd argue it's some kind of "jack of all trades". A bit like python but compiled, ref-counted, and probably a lot faster. It's lacking the huge community python has though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s lacking the huge community python has though.

And where did Rust, Python etc get their huge community from in the first place? From being jack of all trades? No, because they were the best fit for their use case. After they established themselves there, they became widely good.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

tl;dr Language evolution and future outlook are big factors besides the existing language features themselves.

I guess Rust has attracted many C++ devs because C++ is painful and there were no other/better options. Rust comes with a build/dependency management system and memory safety guarantees on top of the type safety. Even though C++ templates are still unmatched, I prefer Rust 95% of the time. C++ is evolving very slow and it's extremely hard to participate. Rust will win that race eventually.

Python has been around since 1991(!) and it took a looong time to build the community. It was a niche like Nim is now for many years.

I'll definitely keep an eye on Nim because it has the potential to become quite popular.

Again, that's all just my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve never been a big fan of transpiled languages. I’ve looked at Nim a few times over the years and while it looks nice, I’ve never found it more compelling than other languages. Chances are there is at least one more not quite mainstream language that does something cool that will fit your usecase more and not be transpiled.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nim is not transpiled. Transpilation means translation between equal levels of abstraction. The C code generated by Nim is not something most people would do anything with.