Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by mrath | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

mrath·

I have been learning Rust recently. Nim looks interesting, is there a quick comparison page with Rust somewhere?

I just skimmed through the doc, and looks like the language is huge. Is it expected to have a big learning curve?

also could not find any info on Async and threading is there any documentation around it?

And the GC, is it optional or more like compiler determines it using set of rules?

View on HN

I found it was easy to write Nim coming from Python and doing a few tutorials I found around the web and some programming puzzles. The advanced features like macros, tempates, generics, etc. are harder to learn, but I haven't needed them yet so far. I did have to dig into the actual library source code several times because the documentation is quite sparse, and for things like async and parallel programming there aren't many examples to pull from at all. However, I find it's way easier to program in Nim with static typing and the applications I write are much faster than Python, even without the crutches of numpy operations, pandas dataframes, and the huge Python ecosystem.

Nim's a great language. Its heritage is Pascal, so that might explain some of the cognitive dissonance you could be experiencing about it.

There are quite a few features but to me you can get pretty far learning somewhat gradually.

Threading is in the manual which is linked on the documentation page.

Async stuff is documented in modules like https://nim-lang.org/docs/asyncdispatch.html

In particular, how does it compare in compile time, binary size, and total build size if those values for Rust are "slow", "large", and "enormous"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com