I've been trying to learn it / grok its documentation for awhile. Any suggestions on how to learn it better? I've given Exercism.IO a try (disclaimer: satisfied learner from there but not trying to shill) but I've had difficulty adopting the language from a Python background.
If you haven't read through the Nim-for-Pythoners [1] it'd be good. I read the "nim manual" [2] constantly and just use ctrl-f. Though Nim Basics by narimiran is a nice tutorial form [3].
There's a few standard links: 1: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programm... 2: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html 3: https://narimiran.github.io/nim-basics/
I did not see any allocs/de-allocs, which suggests some kind of garbage collector is being used? I guess a lot of that is straightforward with stack allocated data structures going out of scope. But that would put this language in the same realm as Go and not Rust/C/C++, which don't rely on garbage collectors.
I'm mainly doing Kotlin currently, which also has a multi platform compiler (with native, js, and jvm compilers). Though particularly the native compiler is a bit a work in progress. But, Nim could be considered similar to that as well. Though obviously the languages are very different, what is similar though is a focus on programmer convenience. It's something I really appreciate in Kotlin and it seems this language has a lot of that too.
It will be interesting to see how this language grows and evolves. Looking at Rust and Go in recent years, there are a bunch of gnarly topics that inevitably come up like how to deal with asynchronous stuff and co-routines, generics, error handling, etc. Kotlin also had its fair share of that. That's when languages get more complicated. I think Rust is a good example of a language that has a pretty high level of complexity at this point.
Just a first impression. But mostly a good one.
I'd say the opposite. Just look at how it compares to C++. Even Swift is a rather complex language when compared to Rust.
Nim use a new GC they call ARC, which is just a clever combination of non-atomic/locking reference counting and move semantics. That combination enables the GC to be realtime capable and deterministic. It's also doesn't have GC pauses or issues with enormous heaps, but it requires more work when multi-threading. In theory Nim sounds be more similar to Go than Rust/C/C++, but with ARC you can use Nim where you'd use C/C++ (or turn off GC entirely). I'm using it on embedded RTOS'es and routinely getting exactly the same memory allocations with only a single integer add/sub overhead. Actually, many larger Rust programs end up using `Rc<mystruct>` a lot, which should result in an almost one-to-one correspondence on generated code to what Nim+ARC produces.
> I'm mainly doing Kotlin currently, which also has a multi platform compiler (with native, js, and jvm compilers). Though particularly the native compiler is a bit a work in progress. But, Nim could be considered similar to that as well.
Probably not a bad comparison. Kotlin sounds like a pragmatic language with just enough "functional concepts" to make it more productive but not type/theory heavy.
> It will be interesting to see how this language grows and evolves. Looking at Rust and Go in recent years, there are a bunch of gnarly topics that inevitably come up like how to deal with asynchronous stuff and co-routines, generics, error handling, etc.
Ouch, those are tough topics. I avoid Nim's async because it requires cycle detection (ARC w/ cycle detection) on embedded. Rust has difficulty with closures and async for similar reasons IIRC. Luckily Nim's error handling/async/co-routines are all pretty standard otherwise. There's some work to be done in Nim for improving modules and removing nill'able types from the standard library. But nothing that should cause the gnarly topics Rust/Go have been facing (:fingers-crossed:).
"nim in action" by dom96 https://www.manning.com/books/nim-in-action
nim days by xmonader https://xmonader.github.io/nimdays/
Some years ago when I was going through languages frequently, I was pretty interested in it for a bit, but found it kind of hard to get into and my interest ultimately wandered.
I thought a large part of that was due to my unusually strong dislike of the syntax, and that that was why I found it unusually difficult to grok. Maybe it wasn't. Interesting.