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Comment by pindab0ter | Hacker News Reader

What's the main use case of Nim, would you say? Is it good for personal project/automation, for desktop or web apps? Etc.

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I started using it for parsing heavy files, just for the speed. Slowly I replaced Python with Nim for almost everything, even when it doesn't make much sense (e.g. for controlling Selenium), and only use Python when I need graphics (Matplotlib) or some other libraries that I cannot replace.

IMO the main case is when you need C speed but you don't want to code in C.

Nim as a replacement for Python makes sense to me. We often hear that many Python developers went on to choose Go when needing more performance, but Nim feels like an easier move.

Nim code also tends to run faster than Go code (in my experience).

I didn’t meassure, but I also don’t have any experience saying otherwise. Both are great languages and depending on the problem I’d be happy to use either.

Nim not only faster than Go but have a very similar syntax to python. It make more sense for Python developers to use Nim when need more speed instead of Go.

> use Python when I need graphics (Matplotlib)

I'm always open to suggestions etc. as to what's missing in ggplotnim [0]. I'd hope that by now the majority of use cases are covered.

[0]: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

This sounds cool, I would be very interested if you had any public code on how to control Selenium using Nim.

I just use https://github.com/halonium/halonium, to automate some simple tasks. My code is less interesting than the "examples" folder of that repo.

When you want the performance of a low level compiled language with the ease of use and powerful constructs of a high level language - and don't want all the bondage and discipline of rust.

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