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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

i wish D had good, complete qt bindings. it seems like the best option for a new standard compile-to-native desktop gui app language. i have a personal preference for ML-family languages, but i think those have already lost the war for mindshare; D on the other hand is solidly C-family and therefore familiar, but is a way more pleasant language than C++.

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D's binaries still aren't small[0], what with including the entire prelude without code elimination.

Sure, they seem tiny alongside Electron, but a giant doesn't look big next to Jupiter.

Nim competes in the same space, and seems to hit this problem a whole lot nicer. [1]

[0] http://forum.dlang.org/thread/yhcopkgdkhclbkfpisut@forum.dla...

[1] https://hookrace.net/blog/nim-binary-size/

I do agree with everything you said, but a) I'd still rather the giant than jupiter and b) Nim still has a long way to go to prove itself. Just like D, it is in the awkward position of being high performance without fully addressing either the performance or safety concerns of the preceding languages. This may be an acceptable tradeoff but neither have any killer features that make it an obvious good fit for a given problem. Rust has memory safety-like, actual memory safety-and go has utter simplicity. What is the Nim two word pitch? Small binaries isn't going to win anyone; that's what deflate is for. Meanwhile, you don't have the language stability and, erm, prudent design that D has hammered out for over a decade. Even if I don't agree with the decisions I can't say D has executed poorly.

Nim though? Who knows! I've never seen it in production, so I can't tell the downfalls!

Absolutely agree on a.

I think the popularity of Electron is a travesty.

I live in Australia, but despite it being a first world nation, the Internet speed is miserable and bandwidth is precious. (I pay $50 a month for 100gb, at 1.5mbms). Size still matters.

I do quite like D and the structured process of developing the language they use.

But I also find it incredibly depressing that Nim has a better optimising compiler.

> What is the Nim two word pitch?

Metaprogramming. The best metaprogramming anywhere.

What about Lisp-family languages' metaprogramming capabilities?

i'm pretty sure the racket folks would take issue with that (:

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