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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see news about Nim I just wish Cobra[0] would get the same love...

    Recent News
    2013-12-23  Cobra 0.9.6 has been released.

Maybe because this is Hacker "News" and Cobra hasn't had a release in 4-5 years is why it's not mentioned much.

Nim transpiles to C, C++, or JavaScript so it can run on nearly anything (Windows, Linux, MacOS, embedded to some degree, web browser...etc). Cobra appears to be .NET, so a little more restricted I guess.

Compiles... compiles.

Edit -

Sorry - that was rude. I should have elaborated.

Transpiling is a specific type of compilation that involves two languages with a similar level of abstraction.

Compilation involves languages with different levels of abstraction.

Nim offers a much higher-level abstraction than C, thus you could consider the process of converting Nim to C, a compilation process rather than a transpilation process.

This comes up everytime i post about this and most people agree with me that transpile means convert to a different source language. It is definitely a common use, but I realize it is a gray area.

Edit: Compiling def isn't wrong, but Transpiling is more descriptive to me as it indicates you're not going to assembly or machine language or something like that.

Compiling is the correct terminology here. Nim transpiles to JavaScript, but it compiles to C and C++. You don't say that Rust transpiles to LLVM IR, do you?

I would say compiles is a more general form of transpiles. Transpiling meaning it compiles into a higher level form i.e. c, C++, JavaScript, and compile meaning it compiles into a more lower level form i.e assembly, bytecode, etc?

That's just how I look at it anyway.

Mad respect for you Dom, but why would going from Nim -> JS be Transpiling and Nim-> C++ be compiling? Both go from a high level Lang to another high level Lang.

I don't consider C/C++ high-level.

I would normally agree with you, but that seems subjective.

It is indeed a little subjective and changes with time. This Wikipedia article explains it fairly well I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_languag...

Why?

> First class support for unit tests and contracts this maybe ?

I don't know about Cobra, but I would say Nim has first class support for unit tests. If you check out the "Testable documentaion examples" section of the article, it shows they've even added support for testing sample code in inline function documentation. This is a really interesting approach. I don't use Nim myself (not a "systems" programmer - what a silly term that is, we all make "systems" but I guess that boat has sailed) but I'm interested in applying a similar approach in other languages.

Not the parent but my personal pet-peeve is case-insensitive variable names - a deal breaker for me.

> "That means only the first letters are compared in a case sensitive manner. Other letters are compared case insensitively within the ASCII range and underscores are ignored." [1]

Wow, this is strange. I understand the reasoning but strongly disagree with it. Not sure if it's a deal-breaker for me though, just... strange.

[1]: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#lexical-analysis-ident...

It definitely doesn't exist in any other language, so from that perspective it is strange. But please give Nim a try before closing the web page because of this feature.

Yeah like I said before, it's not necessarily a show-stopper, it just threw me off.

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