Slashdot Mirror
Nim Programming Language Gaining Traction
An anonymous reader writes: Nim is a young, statically typed programming language that has been getting more attention recently. See these articles for an introduction: What is special about Nim?, What makes Nim practical? and How I Start: Nim. The language offers a syntax inspired by Python and Pascal, great performance and C interfacing, and powerful metaprogramming capabilities. The author of "Unix in Rust" just abandoned Rust in favor of Nim and some early-adopter companies are starting to use it as well.
A new fad sweeps through the kiddies every 3-5 years. I guess everyone wants to be one the crest of the new wave so they all rush out to learn the newest one, hoping maybe they'll get to write the book or teach a bootcamp, after it gets advertised on Slashdot of course.
Nim is just yet another statically-typed GC language with an unsafe escape hatch. I can get the same thing (and much better syntax) with Java and JNI or C# and P/Invoke. Yawn.
Rust, on the other hand, is something genuinely new: it provides completely memory safety without a requiring a garbage collector at all. It's sad to seeing people switch from Rust to Nim: they're often too inexperienced to know what they're giving up, and I feel like they're seeking (syntactic) novelty, not a programming environment that's actually useful.
nim, like python, requires strict indentation. That's not comfortable for some people. I, for one, have nystagmus and find it practically impossible to code in python. I suspect I'd have the same issues with nim.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
As I have recently found out, that also affects the code generation.
It is hard to generate Python code, without actually analyzing what's precisely is being generated. If source is 100% generated - it is doable, relatively easy. But generally generated code also contains pieces of user code, which might/might not require its own indentation and also reindentation to make it proper part of the generated code.
If Python at least allowed optional block statement - curly brackets or begin/end or whatever. But nope. It is appears to be sort of a religious issue for the language creator and some of his followers.
I personally do not like Python for that reason. I prefer to have a visual marker that block is closed. You know, like a dot at the end of the sentence.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Nim looks syntactically a little bit like Kotlin, which compiles to either JVM bytecode or JavaScript. If you compile to the JVM then you can not only use libraries written in Java, but also JavaScript, Python 2.x (via Jython), Ruby, Scala, C (via JNA), there's even a Haskell for the JVM called Frege.
The really neat trick, though, is that despite looking not much like Java at all, it compiles down to code that is binary compatible with Java and there is a Java-to-Kotlin rewriting tool, meaning you can convert existing Java codebases one file at a time whilst still having a fully compilable project. Thus you can not only leverage existing codebases written in many languages, but also slowly convert legacy codebases too.
Kotlin has some syntactic features that look similar to nim, like if being an expression not a statement, ranges, type inference, compile time inlining control, operator overloading, generics etc. Kotlin also has a a variety of features that focus on creating DSLs, but doesn't do it using a full blown macro system.
Nim has some things Kotlin doesn't and vice versa. I can write a more complete comparison (based on reading the docs) if anyone is interested. But the reason I mention it, is Kotlin's focus on interop with existing code.