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.

Comments

So?

[QuoteMstr]

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.

Not for everybody due to indentation

[blind biker]

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.

Re:Such potential

[ThePhilips]

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.