what are you making in NIM? Finance stuff? Websites? Database tools? Science/Space?
Kinda curious what you've done "using Nim pretty intensively for several years"
Kinda curious what you've done "using Nim pretty intensively for several years"
I had an implementation in Python and just ported it to Nim. I have been incredibly impressed with Nim to say the least. I managed to make the Nim version orders of magnitude faster with fewer lines of code while having more features. With the excellent Nimporter library, I can easily make a Python API and have it be pip installable.
I genuinely think Nim (or similar) may be the future of my field. Combined with its JS compile target and WASM support, it lets me target my three main “platforms“: web, Python API, and high-performance CLI.
There is https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer n-dimensional tensor (ndarray) library
Native plotting library: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim
as well as many other packages.
Julia was no faster than Python with my initial naive implementation. After consulting the forum and getting help, I did manage to get it running fast. My impression of Julia is that it can be incredibly fast but it takes work to get to that stage.
In contrast, with Nim, my code looked nearly identical to my Python code (i.e. quite simple) and ran fast from the start. This has been my general impression of Nim after doing a few projects in it: you write clean, readable code and get fast code out. There is no step 2.
With respect to numerical algorithms, Nim has good support for BLAS and LAPACK. I personally haven’t used them, so I can’t comment.
Nim’s metaprogramming allows for things like this [1], which is a macro library that translates between idiomatic Python and Nim. While I don’t use it myself (I find Nim’s idioms to make sense for Nim) it does make the transition a lot easier.
It's an incredibly adaptable tool. I mean, just take the example of writing type safe Nim code and compiling it to JS for a web client (already handy), then writing a high performance server in the same language, sharing the same types/code, but compiled to C. We can bring together front-end and backend! :)
Another generalist ability is with libraries you can get a high cooperation with Python - you can run Nim from Python and Python from Nim - so you can merge with that ecosystem too and use existing infrastructure as required. And of course an even better situation exists with C and C++.
Personally it's been a great way to diversify my ability to reach different domains with a unified tool.