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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Nim is really cool. I tried it out for a few weeks last year.

It's biggest problem is the lack of engaged contributers (really only 2 or 3), leading to many bugs ( you can never really trust the compiler), little documentation, and a very messy standard library.

Creating a language is really hard work. Nim is impressive considering how many people work in it.

But in it's current state you can really only use it for "just for fun" projects.

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I've been put off it for similar reasons - there doesn't seem to be much community or momentum. This means on the one hand that there's not as many resources as you might need and on the other hand that I'm concerned the project might falter and become abandoned. By contrast I'm really interested in Rust because as well as having interesting features I feel pretty confident that it's going to keep growing thanks to it's enthusiastic community.

The sad thing about it is for many situations, Nim would be a better fit than Rust just due to GC (this makes Nim conceptually simpler and higher-level in a lot of contexts). Yet they can't raise more than $3k in support (see the top of this link).

Not sure what has to happen for adoption but it's a real gem of a language that just needs users.

> Yet they can't raise more than $3k in support (see the top of this link).

Unfortunately the image on that page is misleading. We have been getting ~$1300 every month for the duration of our BountySource campaign, which isn't bad. I think that the ~$3k value only includes direct non-recurring payments via BountySource.

Sadly, it isn't enough for either of us to work full-time on Nim.

Glad to hear it. Thanks for your work on the language and the book. For those interested in the language, it's worth your money:

https://www.manning.com/books/nim-in-action

No problem. Thank you for picking up a copy of my book, I'm glad you're enjoying it :)

I hope you are making at least a little bit of money for yourself with the book. ;)

Must have been a lot of work.

Nim's idea is great, but the implementation and doc aren't currently at a place where someone like me that isn't ac advanced programmer could efficiently utilize. I read the opening chapter last year though and it is really well written and clear. I'd really like to see Crystal, Nim, or Red take off.

A language is as good as its libraries are. Do you provide libs for IOT? WebDev? games? People say, Go is successful because it's backed by Google, no, it's successful because its std lib has a socket and an http server. Focus on a niche, be successful in that niche and people will try to use it for everything else.

Webdev and games are fairly well covered, not sure about IOT but as far as embedded goes I know people are using it on arduino & RPi.

Check out the stdlib: http://nim-lang.org/docs/lib.html

Some interesting projects related to the above:

Webdev frameworks:

https://github.com/dom96/jester

https://flyx.github.io/emerald/

https://github.com/onionhammer/nim-templates.git

Gamedev:

Urho3D game engine wrapper: https://github.com/3dicc/Urhonimo

Nim GLSL framework (allows writing GLSL in Nim, meaning you can use metaprogramming in GLSL): https://github.com/yglukhov/nimsl

Roguelike api: https://github.com/Vladar4/libtcod-nim/

SFML lib: https://github.com/BlaXpirit/nim-csfml

SDL lib: https://github.com/PMunch/SDLGamelib

High level glfw wrapper: https://github.com/ephja/nim-glfw

Chipmonk wrapper: https://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-chipmunk/

Blog on writing a 2D platformer in Nim: https://hookrace.net/blog/writing-a-2d-platform-game-in-nim-...

Blog on making a JS NES emulator in Nim: https://hookrace.net/nimes/

There is a (very minimal) HTTP server in the stdlib. It can be used for very quick prototyping.

It can easily be wrapped in a more usable API, for instance I have made mine: https://github.com/andreaferretti/rosencrantz

webdev https://github.com/dom96/jester

Nim's standard lib also has sockets and http. Nim's niche is clean and fast code, with strong C/C++ interop and metaprogramming.

Run 'nimble search game' to get a list like this (I did not copy and paste the whole list):

libtcod-nim: url: git://github.com/Vladar4/libtcod-nim/ (git) tags: roguelike, game, library, engine, sdl, opengl, glsl description: Wrapper of the libtcod library for the Nim language. license: zlib website: https://github.com/Vladar4/libtcod-nim

nimgame: url: git://github.com/Vladar4/nimgame/ (git) tags: game, engine, sdl description: Simple 2D game engine for Nim language. license: MIT website: https://github.com/Vladar4/nimgame

sfml: url: git://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-sfml/ (git) tags: game, library, opengl description: High level OpenGL-based Game Library license: MIT website: https://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-sfml

enet: url: git://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-enet/ (git) tags: game, networking, udp description: Wrapper for ENet UDP networking library license: MIT website: https://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-enet

fowltek: url: git://github.com/fowlmouth/nimlibs/ (git) tags: game, opengl, wrappers, library, assorted description: A collection of reusable modules and wrappers. license: MIT website: https://github.com/fowlmouth/nimlibs

nimrod-glfw: url: git://github.com/rafaelvasco/nimrod-glfw/ (git) tags: library, glfw, opengl, windowing, game description: Nim bindings for GLFW library. license: MIT website: https://github.com/rafaelvasco/nimrod-glfw

chipmunk: url: git://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-chipmunk/ (git) tags: library, physics, game description: Bindings for Chipmunk2D 6.x physics library (for backwards compatibility) license: MIT website: https://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-chipmunk

chipmunk6: url: git://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-chipmunk/ (git) tags: library, physics, game description: Bindings for Chipmunk2D 6.x physics library license: MIT website: https://github.com/fowlmouth/nimrod-chipmunk

nim-glfw: url: git://github.com/EXetoC/nim-glfw/ (git) tags: library, glfw, opengl, windowing, game description: A high-level GLFW 3 wrapper license: MIT website: https://github.com/EXetoC/nim-glfw

linagl: url: https://bitbucket.org/BitPuffin/linagl (hg) tags: library, opengl, math, game description: OpenGL math library license: CC0 website: https://bitbucket.org/BitPuffin/linagl

A similar language in this space which does seem to get a lot of support is Crystal.

Agreed. I come from a python background, so Nim is more natural to me, but a lot of Rubyists (particularly those who don't do a lot of metaprogramming (my probably not accurate understanding is Ruby would probably be better here, please correct me)) are very excited to be able to wire what is essentially Ruby code that runs at near C speeds.

Yeah, especially for things like gamedev. It's got the perfect mix of productivity and speed, yet allows complex metaprogramming and compile time evaluation.

It does need more users, for sure, but I think it's a testament to the productivity of the language that people have done so much cool stuff already. Random example, metaprogramming & unit tests for glsl: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimsl

> you can never really trust the compiler

That's interesting, I've had the opposite experience; the few times I think I'm hitting a compiler bug it turns out the compiler is telling what I'm doing wrong but I'm misinterpreting what it's saying. Not saying this applies to you though. Was this with recent versions?

Having said that, with templates and macros I very rarely get a c compilation error (ie; an actual bug), but these are usually because I'm accidentally doing something silly like recursing compile time generation. The compiler should catch these, and it's only rare cases it doesn't.

In my experience writing a game engine in opengl the language has been rock solid and very fast. For me, the core language has been absolutely fantastic and very reliable.

I tried it a little bit 2 years ago. My experience was pretty much:

1) Encounter unexpected behaviour with standard features

2) Ask irc for help

3) Response: shrug must be a compiler bug

Ah, it's moved on quite a bit since then. I started using it around then too, but these days compiler errors are very rare indeed, in my experience anyway.

Put it this way, the only compiler bugs I've had in the last year or so have been c gen errors, maybe two in the past year of pretty heavy use. All of those have been because I've been doing something silly with templates.

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