Nimbus, An Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client
our.status.im
our.status.im
It also runs everywhere. I use its C mode on the server, its js mode on the website, and even its c++ mode to interface with c++ libraries such as steamworks which are hard to interface with.
Nim is also pretty cool by offering templates and macros. Which allow you to make some awesome DSLs that make your code short and sweet. Just don't go too crazy!
I used to really hate typing in C or Java because it felt so boring. I stayed away from typed languages for a long time, but nim has won me back. Types have saved me many times now!
Its also super fast, I mostly programmed in JS/Python and I never knew how fast computers can be.
But from what I’ve tracked probably 5-10% of my coding errors are type errors, and I do a fair amount of ad hoc type checking (if !arg.expectedAttribute throw new Error(“the second arg to blahFunc should have expectedAttribute”)).
There’s definitely a clear cost there, which feels like it outweighs the mundanity of typing.
However, I have come to believe transpiling is the devil, and many-languages syndrome is very counterproductive, so I stick to js, since it’s the only serious candidate for a “One Language” language.
Nim has really good type inference, so the 'mundane' aspect I guess you're referring to isn't there.
let
myStr = "Hello"
myInt = 12
myFloat = 1.2
var myHashTable = newTable[string, int]()
type
Euros = distinct float # NB: Don't use float for currency
Dollars = distinct float
let
a = 10.Dollars
b = 10.Euros
c = a + b # Compile time error
d = a + 1 # Compile time error
proc dollars(e: Euros): Dollars =
let exchangeRate = 1.117
result = (e.float * exchangeRate).Dollars
proc euros(d: Dollars): Euros =
let exchangeRate = 0.858
result = (d.float * exchangeRate).Euros
let
e = a.euros
f = b.dollars
echo e.float # 8.58
echo f.float # 11.17
Why do you believe this? In Nim the language creates an AST and it's this that is output in various forms. The underlying representation is the same, but it allows many targets. Similar to LLVM (which is also a Nim target, if unofficially), it's one of the reasons why it can compile on almost every platform, and why it is a good choice for the low resource devices that projects like Nimbus target.
It also means you can write servers and clients in the same language but target C and JavaScript, respectively.
> Why do you believe this?
In isolation it’s fine.
But when I look at the complete toolchains required to maintain “modern” applications it’s not ok.
There are too many different languages in a single application, too many declarative configuration surfaces, too many chained pipes.
I grew up in a time where you wrote code, compiled and ran. We are overdue for a major collapse of how deep tooling is tolerable for a simple roundtrip source change.
If you’re a pro developer (and I assume you are) then you can ignore this. You can afford to spend 40 hours debugging your toolchain, teaching through 5 different languages and configuration environments to locate a problem.
But tolerable isn’t good enough for me. Frankly, I’m tired of spending my time slogging though DSL after DSL and runtime after runtime. I miss just code.
I believe we are overdue for a resurgence of native languages that can be written just as pure compiled or intetpreted code without a stockade of bizarre executables propping them up.
Crypto has become an interesting play-ground to test out esoteric languages, which is a good thing esp. in a world where we are close to end of moore's law.
Also, what exactly are the capabilities of the client here. They mention running on mobile devices... surely that's not actually doing any mining is it?
Any challenges with getting Nim on mobile? Do you compile to objective-C for iOS devices?
In the future we will probably stay with C or use C++ (for zero cost exceptions).
We might not need Objective-C because the UI/UX part is taken care of by Status React[1] which is written in ClojureScript (and it's currently using Go as an Ethereum/Web3 backend).
The options to compile to Objective-C or JS are still there and that is very nice.