So because of the quirkiness I would understand why it is not a universally adopted language.
Do you have pointers to the comparison with other languages?
There’s a few awkward-ish parts of the syntax, but in practice those items aren’t big issues (compared to say Rust async syntax issue). For example multi-line lambdas can be done with ‘do’ blocks or just wrapping parens. Identifier equality has actually saved me from a few bugs by accidentally creating a new similarly named variable, say an ‘isDone’ when I already had an ‘is_done’ following the style from C FFI. Though the compiler warns by default when mix naming styles, and can be set as an error if desired.
Iterators usage can be a bit annoying though. I also really enjoy UFCS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Function_Call_Syntax
Python comparison example: https://narimiran.github.io//2018/05/10/python-numpy-nim.htm...
Swift and Obj-C's ARC system relies on atomics and their associated issues (explained well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046481).
Nim's ARC system relies on ownership rules that require a single thread to "own" any ARC-managed memory which removes the need for locks or atomics in the reference counts. That eliminates the non-determinism of locks & atomics when doing the RC accounting, overall improving latency and performance. Move semantics increase performance and enables "giving" ownership of ARC-managed memory to another thread.
The way I see it, the GC is just nice to have for productivity, and for those cases where you really need to optimize your program, there is nothing stopping you from managing your memory yourself, you can write your own types with their own constructors/destructors (Nim has "scope-based" memory management akin to RAII in C++), of course, you must be aware that using pointers will lead to potentially unsafe code, Nim can't hold your hand there.
import sequtils
let x = [1,2,3,4,5]
echo x.map(
proc (num: int): int =
num*2
)Nim is in progress to fix them, see here: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/11992
I don't see why people can't admit to shortcomings in languages? I like Nim a lot, doesn't mean I'm blind to where it falls short or needs improvement...
This is a very surface-level complaint, and it is no surprise that almost everyone who complains about this hasn't actually used the language. I will admit it is indeed a peculiar feature, I wouldn't be able to name another language that did this before, but as it turns out, it has yet to be a problem in practice.
Do you fear some crazy person might mix identifier styles? They could do that in any language, Nim has nothing to do with that. The pro of this feature is that you can write your library in whichever style you prefer, and people can use your library and still use their preferred style, I always hated how in python you often end up having to use libraries written in camelCase for your snake_case project (or vice versa).
Once again, it is a rather peculiar feature, like who asked for this? I don't know, but then again, why not? it did make me raise an eyebrow at first, but in practice, Nim gets it just right. The one valid scenario where it could get in the way is when searching your source files for an identifier, but even then Nim has solutions for that (there's nimgrep, and mainstream editors/IDEs are already nim-aware anyways).