Does anyone with significant Nim experience care to lend some opinions? I don't want to start a flame war--I'm genuinely curious.
Historical accident: they started surfacing around the same time, Go was originally described as a systems language (which it never was according to the usual meaning of the term) and Rust had more application-level features (built-in "GC pointer", green threads). As incorrect as it was, the initial… impression? — it's probably the wrong term but I don't have a better one — remained.
Probably doesn't help that Rust also has a number of features Go is criticised for lacking (generics, non-nullable references, immutability support, …)
Fun fact! Go has roots in the Limbo[0] programming language, which runs in a VM, is garbage collected, has communication channels, and was used to write the Inferno[1] operating system, which is sort of a successor to Plan 9 (which is itself sort of a successor to Unix).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_programming_language
[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_%28operating_system%29 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?InfernoOs
So... why not using it to replace C and C++? Since I have worked with Nim (and I use it to implement my own language) I would say "hell yes"! It is such an immensely better language and it integrates perfectly with those eco systems. The GC is a good one (or well, there are 5 to choose from) and it is for many, many applications not an issue.
And before pcwalton drops in with his endless spamming about Nim not being safe, Nim being undefined etc etc (it's getting quite annoying), please spare us this time.
> And before pcwalton drops in with his endless spamming
about Nim not being safe, Nim being undefined
He only jumps in, when someone claims Nim is safe or the sweet spot, or something equally wrong. Nim's pretty syntax comes with a price, just like Rust's safety comes with a different kind of price.
If he has said that, yes, then that would be wrong [1, 2] in that you cannot send GCed references between threads in the first place. For example, the following code results in an error:
var s = "foo"
proc foo {.thread.} =
echo s
createThread(foo)
test.nim(3, 6) Error: 'foo' is not GC-safe as it accesses 's' which is a global using GC'ed memory
[1] Modulo any remaining compiler bugs, of course, or using explicitly unsafe features.
[2] Also, are you maybe confusing this with Go, which does have such a problem?
[1] It may have been that using global variables to share refs between threads did only trigger a warning at some point, not an error. I'm not 100% sure about that. But the serialization has been there since the early days of multi-threading support in 2011.
But how could the segfaults then happen? Aha, you mean the test code perhaps shared via globals?
Personally I am quite sick and tired of that particular "take" on Nim - why not for once criticize other parts of the language? :)
Because I'm not interested in criticizing languages as a whole—that would be language warring for no reason. Claims of memory safety are what are important to me, just as, for example, claims of correct crypto constructions are important to crypto people.
Anyway, I see no reason to go further here, given that nobody has claimed anything is memory safe.
Claims that Nim is memory-safe when it's not is not a difference of design goal though.
It seems to me that a) Nim is (or at least is meant to be, but bugs can sidestep it) memory safe if you stay within the rules for it, and b) Nim is not throwing around vague claims of safety that are not documented in the language manual.
That's completely worthless. C is also memory-safe if you stay within the rules for memory safety.
> Nim is not throwing around vague claims of safety that are not documented in the language manual.
Of course not since nim is not posting on HN (as it's not a sentient being prone to procrastination) it's obviously nim supporters making claims about nim's safety.
It's really not any weaker of a guarantee than Rust makes, being memory-safe if you stay within the rules of not saying `unsafe`. Or opening /proc/self/mem for writing, anyway.
I'd also feel a lot better about Rust's moral highground of memory safety if its undefined behavior was actually spelled out a bit more rather than just punting the hard parts to llvm docs. I don't think every Rust user knows how to avoid aliasing problems between `&mut` and `*mut` either.
That said, I don't agree with the claim that Nim is less safe than Rust because Nim uses "ptr" types and Rust uses "unsafe" blocks to mark unsafe regions. I prefer Rust's approach, but it's pretty much just a question of UI, not anything substantive.
As I understand things, though, solving them is a work in progress.
And you asked why this happens, and I answered, because Nim claims it is secure. Not more not less.
It's like saying OpenSSL is perfectly (or as good as it gets) secure, and there aren't any known vulnerabilities. That statement is going to get a strong reaction from anyone that specializes in security and reads HN (for example tpatcek).
I don't like or dislike Nim. I did like Nim's macro system, although I fear its too powerful (it seems like macros would be really easy solution in many cases).
But I am genuinely interested in where this claim is made, perhaps we need to adjust some documentation or make things more clear - so do point us to it if you find it again.
However, that he stopped in his own comment to bring it up and drop a counter says more about him than pcwalton. Shows a strong bias for and protectiveness of Nim while also disregarding the entire reliability or security aspects of the language. That's really something for a C++ alternative given its safety focus. ;)
I assume the distinction you are making about "serious" is around manual memory management and the GC?
In which case, I think you are probably right in your bias. That said and while i have no experience with it, Nim claims to have a real-time GC mechanism builtin. That is they support a max pause time parameter. There have been other real-time GC systems out there before and they tend to work well for other definitions of "serious".
https://github.com/teepee/arewewebyet looks abandoned.
HTTP Server? DB Drivers? Frameworks? E-Mail?
I mean on Node.js I use Hapi (+a few plugins) and Sequelize, which does pretty much everything for me. I would guess, that everything besides the DB drivers is available in Rust too...
For servers, there's rotor and hyper. Database drivers, we have very good Postgres and MongoDB options, with some SQlite bindings too. Possibly others, I don't pay too much attention to this space. We have multiple ORMs, one of which is being written by the maintainer of Rails' ActiveRecord. As for frameworks, we don't have a ton of full-stack ones, but a number of the smaller ones, iron, nickel, etc. I haven't explored email yet, but I know that there's some work there.
Frameworks - all is fine
HTTP client - Hyper works fine.
Email - homemade email servers is a good way to go into blacklists, so mandrill/postman is the much better choice.
"Several hundred thousand things about the place" - not actual anymore, there are rare things which are not covered by crates. Just open crates.io and type name of thing you need.
Are there any other good references for what the current state of these sorts of capabilities have reached? There are any number of crates out there for this sort of thing, but assessing usefulness seems dodgy at this point.
edit: It seems that I can't edit that comment anymore.
(Nothing against Nim, I haven't worked with it yet)
I strongly prefer Rust's safety but it's not quite the same as a blind FFI like Nim.
Can you elaborate on to how not having to type unsafe makes debugging of this easier?
But I stand corrected.