New Release Of Nim Borrows From Python, Rust, Go, and Lisp (fossbytes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "Nim compiles and runs fast, delivers tiny executables on several platforms, and borrows great ideas from numerous other languages," according to InfoWorld. After six years, they write, Nim is finally "making a case as a mix of the best of many worlds: The compilation speed and cross-platform targeting of Go, the safe-by-default behaviors of Rust, the readability and ease of development of Python, and even the metaprogramming facilities of the Lisp family..."

Fossbytes adds that Nim's syntax "might remind you of Python as it uses indented code blocks and similar syntax at some occasions. Just like Rust and Go, it uses strong types and first class functions... Talking about the benchmarks, it's comparable to C. Nim compiler produces C code by default. With the help of different compiler back-ends, one can also get JavaScript, C++, or Objective-C.
There's an improved output system in the newest release, and both its compiler and library are MIT licensed. Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments. Is anybody excited about writing code in Nim?

Comments

Excited about writing code in Nim?

[alvieboy]

Nim (*).

We are The Knights Who Say "Ni!".

(*) In Portuguese, "Nim" can be seen as a hybrid of "no" [Não], and "yes" [Sim]. Often used to express "I could, but I won't".

Re:Whitespace takes the most space

[Half-pint HAL]

Show me some code that shows how Nim can do things better. It's more convincing than a list of bullet points anyway.

Wrong question. The single most interesting idea I've seen in Nim isn't something you can see in a piece of code: it's how it aids the programmer in optimising code late. It's only the memory management system, but the idea is that you prototype your code with a garbage collector switched on, and once the code is working, and assuming you need the performance gain, you code up your own memory management routines tailored to your code.

It's an idea that seems logical, but is frustratingly uncommon, and is not normally an in-built feature of the language, but rather just a part of the dev workflow (for example: use a generic sort algorithm from a library during prototyping, then analyse the data you're working with in large-scale tests and select or code a more efficient implementation for your situation). The weakness in doing this manually is that it first means tying your codebase to a library, with its various quirks, and then potentially rewriting vast chunks of code to get it to work with a different library (and then there's the risk of cascading changes).

I think Nim's approach is a small step in the right direction, taking us towards logic first, optimisation later.