Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

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So, there I was in 2016. It had been 13 years since I had last entertained the desire to learn a new programming language (I had landed on Python, back then). The serious contenders were Go, Nim, and Rust. I landed on Nim back then, thinking to myself: Man, this language really has a future. I did my next side project in Nim, and loved it like I've loved no other language over the course of my (as of now, in 2025) 28 years of programming. But no actual job ever materialized to make me into a professional Nim programmer that would actually pay the bills. I stuck it out with Python, with growing discontentment. I took a Perl job in 2018, which lasted until 2022, which I never should have taken in the first place. I was relatively free in my choice of language from that point forward, and decided to switch from Python to Lua after a short period of disorientation where I kind of liked Haxe. Right now, I'm learning Rust, crying tears over that future for Nim that never materialized.

Had almost the same situation to a tee around the same time (~2014). Decided between Rust, Nim, D and Go. Went with Rust then and quickly felt it had been the right choice since it really helped me improving my skills and got me interested in programming again after a few years away from it. Rust community was way smaller and more approachable, the language felt exciting and really delivered on its promises.

Then around 2019 Nim started to gain momentum (preparing for 1.0 release) and when I looked into it a bit deeper it became evident that for most of the code I usually write for myself Nim is just a more pragmatic choice than Rust. It gets me there faster.

Zero job perspectives both times, scratched my own itch twice though.

Glad I haven't gone with Go. Nim is not a perfect overlap with Rust, but it definitely covers everything Go can do and more and is a better design in my opinion.

Haha. I'm still in the 'this language has a future' phase with OCaml.

You could always go work for Jane Street or... nope thats all I got lol

Honestly, we can all still correct it if we really want to. Nothing is too late in my opinion, but the question that I wish to ask is, is it worth it?

I mean, compared to zig which is starting to have a lot of hype and libraries / help, lets say that we now wish for nim to have this, then are the feature differences b/w zig and nim worth the revival of nim in that sense? (Pardon me if this doesn't make sense)

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