Of Rust, Crystal, Julia, etc I'm most excited about Nim because of expressiveness (macros), ergonomics(simple syntax and GC), and speed (native compilation). Anxiously awaiting 1.0 so I can really commit.
That remark, however, is not to minimize the appeal of Nim, which has other interesting properties as well as native compilation, which is undeniably advantageous in some cases. I hope the tooling matures and the language continues to grow. It certainly deserves a chance.
> speed (native compilation)
Native compilation is often stated as a speed benefit, and it definitely saves startup costs, but Java is still extraordinarily fast; the JIT is an impressive thing.
I think there are good reasons for native: deterministic runtimes; fast startup times; low memory overhead; and lower runtime costs. Some of those you give up by adding a GC back in though.
Speed isn't necessarily one of the reasons for native.
JVM's jit is indeed fast enough for my tastes but Java is grotesque. kotlin might be nice (been meaning to play around with it for a while).
And how it is!
I don't understand why people consider Java "fast". The JVM may be fast on pure server applications. On clients however it is still unacceptably slow in comparison to native applications. Just consider Eclipse and compare it with Ada's GPS editor, or with native C++ IDE's. The startup time of Clojure applications is also still beyond acceptance for me.
I know a lot of programming languages. Nim is one of the most productive ever. It is like safe programming C with the clean syntax of Python and the nice macro features of Lisp.