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Nim core developer wanted

forum.nim-lang.org

157 pointsevacchi18 comments

Hope they find someone, nim is a very good language for how small and independent it is. Especially considering its operating in the same realm as heavyweights like rust and go.

I'm very bullish on Nim. We're crossing the finish line of putting our first Nim code into production at work and overall it's been a pretty positive experience.

I'm interested in hearing about your experience! Pitfalls? Major positives? Have you considered writing about it?

I have! And I will... I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

The main takeaway is specific to my use-case: writing a dynamic library that can be called from within Python code. The main positive and negative are two sides of the same coin: since Nim compiles to C, you get to use all the existing tools designed for doing C FFI in Python, and don't have to write any C wrappers. And since Nim isn't C, there's still a little bit of detective work involved in replicating all the argument types, GC behavior, etc, that is involved in Nim and the specifics of its realization in C.

Have you encountered any major compiler bugs? Nim looks great, but the list of open issues on GitHub would scare me from using it in production. Or isn't it as severe in real-world use?

There are compiler bugs, but almost all of them are related to advanced metaprogramming. If you stick to "normal" metaprogramming (generics, templates, sane macros), compiler works well.

I haven't encountered any compiler bugs, no. I know that they're still really pushing on some of the further reaches—what comes to mind is statically verifying that a value is never `nil`, as well as some of the more industrial-strength elements of the metaprogramming system—but both of those are very much optional.

emsy: I'm not OP, but I encountered quite a few compiler bugs when I was using Nim a couple of years ago, but that was only because I tried to push the macro system really hard.

Generally most bugs are related to newer features. I never experienced any bugs with the core features/library.

Nim donation page is here: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nim

Nim is one of those things that seems very well put together yet I can't currently see what role it fills in the wider market for programming languages and different types of communities around them.

What kind of stuff is particularly popular among Nim users compared to communities for other languages?

What kind of stuff do the people working on Nim want to use it / see it used for?

Games, or soft real-time systems (like audio tools; synths, DAWs, or editors). Potentially, cross-platform mobile apps.

Thanks to its approach to GC, you can impose a limit on the time to spend on GC between ticks, so no unpredictable performance stuttering.

I see it as having nice "functional-ish" syntax like Python, but with static types.

A limit on GC time might then obviously lead to high or too high memory use, potentially?

Not OP or aware of Nim's specific implementation, but in some cases, yes. However in a fps-sensitive situation like a game, it just takes ~16ms of GC before you've missed at least one refresh. By limiting the time to something lower, we can distribute this time such that the user doesn't notice any stuttering, provided the GC events were spaced out enough.

>I can't currently see what role it fills in the wider market for programming languages

"As friendly as python or ruby, but compiles to binary for ease of deployment and speed" is currently an under-served market niche.

Rust, Go and Swift are all candidates for the space (with the current defacto standard of friendliness in compiled languages being c++), but I find none is quite a match for me.

Nim is very good for small-to-medium sized services, but competing with Go is difficult for a grass-root language.

Yet, Nim has a tiny memory and storage footprint and runs on microcontrollers thanks to GCC, which makes it ideal for IoT stuff.

>but competing with Go is difficult for a grass-root language.

Yeah, I don't have any sound technical reasons for not using Go, I just find it to be somewhat claustrophobic to use. To paraphrase someone else, when I code in Go I feel like Rob Pike is standing over my shoulder muttering "why would you want to do that?" every 10 minutes or so.

Glad to see small languages like this getting support and traction.

I thought the new GC v2 multithreaded has just landed 2 weeks ago. I'm only aware of one non-mt related open GC bug.

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