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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

Nim has sort of been in my peripheral vision for awhile but I’ve never really checked it out.

Any Nim fans have a good link to a good sell for it? No cynicism at all: I’m genuinely curious?

I'd say just try it out for yourself with these simple examples: https://nim-by-example.github.io/

Here's a nice link comparing memory safety of C, Zig, Rust and Nim – https://uploads.peterme.net/nimsafe.html – which was inspired by this post: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/

Thank you! Will check it out!

You may like to take a look at the NimConf presentations - https://conf.nim-lang.org/2020/ and https://conf.nim-lang.org/2021/ - for some nice inspiration as well as discussions of pros and cons done by actual practitioners.

As for me, in short words, what I found especially amazing in Nim was its resemblance to pseudocode (I literally found that it's a great notation to use when thinking in a notebook), fast compile times while at the same time low-bloat, macros, and the crazy impressive cross-platform story - including a JS target (I used it to write a functioning WebExt plugin for a browser; though I quickly got tired of the HTML+CSS part that remained necessary). At the other end of the x-platform spectrum, if you take a look at the videos, people are also successfully playing with Nim on microcontrollers (and I mean the real, small ones, not the Linux-hosting kinds). As for a few less amazing aspects, I struggled with the parallelism story; it is there, which makes it a complete modern runtime - but I found it nonstandard enough (and possibly somewhat unpolished?) that I failed to complete a hobby project where it was required. Thus (and also for a number of completely of unrelated reasons) I personally switched to learning Rust after Nim. Nim's package management is also missing lockfiles for reproducibility; I believe this might have recently gotten back into spotlight and hopefully is being worked on, but I don't know for sure, I'm not tracking the community now.

PS. Ah, and Araq (the BDFL) is constantly experimenting with some really cool stuff (e.g. the Orc garbage collector). Which gives the language and ecosystem some of its most interesting, exciting, and exceptional traits; OTOH then I'd say the financial support story of the language is regrettably not enough for some of the class-leading prototypes to make it past teaser stage (see e.g. DrNim: https://nim-lang.org/docs/drnim.html).

I don’t have any convincing links, but my sell would be that a yokel like me was able to learn and build things with Nim really quickly. It was something like 4 hours to start getting familiar and seeing results. I was able to make a wordle clone in a few days of very limited spare time.

The reference I used the most was this:

https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-TypeScript-Prog...

Less of a global sales pitch for Nim (I'm a shoo-in from Pascal), but I found this today and thought it was neat:

"Enu lets you build and explore worlds using a familiar block-building interface and a Logo inspired API."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECJsq7BeZ8w

https://github.com/dsrw/enu

I am working on OpenStreetMap renderer in Nim - see https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/ (but work somewhat stalled)

I needed some language which is:

- compiled to binaries

- and really fast

- has needed libraries (HTTP server, protocol buffers, sqlite and image generation)

- it's easy to set up

It was nice experience and Nim simply worked for my needs. People on Nim forum were nice and helped me when I ran into problems. It has nice and usable built-in library and I was really impressed by graphic library pixie - https://github.com/treeform/pixie

I would use Nim again when I when I will see this application is suited for it (e.g. some command line apps).

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