Comment by o2348diuu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by o2348diuu | Hacker News Reader

Nim. I understand some reasons for this, as I didn't pay attention to it very much for awhile myself. I think it's only the last year or two that it's reached maturity. Its primary alternatives also have the advantage of huge existing resource bases.

I'm someone who thinks there is room for lots of good languages, and each has its role, so I don't think languages should be pitted against one another necessarily.

However, with Nim you have something very similar to Python in its expressivity, but with performance comparable to things like Rust and C++. The metaprogramming is very well done as far as I've seen, and it seems very well thought out. It also has solid, useful compilation targets.

It just seems like the whole package for a lot of use cases and I'm not sure why it's not getting a lot more attention.

I’ve used nim in production and I even wrote a very small part of the language itself; and it’s great in many ways, but unfortunately it lacks taste. When a language gets that complex it needs to be consistent and it needs to exhaustively cover use cases and nim is obviously better than C, no question, but it’s no Ruby. Maybe it will be one day, but for now having a smaller amount of features like Rust allows for a cleaner more cohesive picture and building on top of that is easier. Though I hate Rust’s syntax. Crystal looked promising for a while, but dev there is slow.

I still wish the coffeescript model had worked out where we could view or think about languages differently and compile them to a common one. But unfortunately it doesn’t work without a great deal of effort.

> unfortunately it lacks taste

Could you expand on that? I always thought the core nim language was fine. But, I've also come to the conclusion that the few libraries I've used that were written in nim are of poor quality. Is that a function of the language? The community? Or both? I have no idea.

>unfortunately it lacks taste

Taste is subjective ...

De gustibus non est disputandum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandu...

... so it is almost as though by default, you have to explain/justify your opinion on this :)

Multiple and optional GC methods, exception tracking, effect system, ability to generate C and JavaScript, C-to-Nim translation and wrapper generation.

Nim is underrated indeed.

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