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Comment by elcritch | Hacker News Reader

Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.

The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim

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Nitter's author has suggested at least once that due to problems with Nim, a rewrite in Go is in the works:

"The long-term plan is to rewrite the source code in Go, as I'm no longer interested in using Nim. This isn't a small task, but building more features with the current state of things is painful. Before doing that I'll fix some feature parity issues, and work on some conveniences for instance operators. Stay tuned."

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/discussions/1212

Honestly seems like a good move. It also isn't likely to be very difficult with the help of LLMs.

Curious as an outsider: what sorts of problems are there in the Nim world, and why would things improve by switching to Go?

Basically lack of polish. Nim's compiler just keeps evolving around unfinished and unpolished ideas never reaching a momentum.

It's a research project of its BDFL and he is alienating the most senior developers and contributors to Nim's ecosystems (ie Zedeus).

More stable, commonly supported platform I presume. You don't want to be on a snowflake platform for a long running project, it only causes endless problems.

Go has Google behind it. It's a much more established language with far more mature packages and a much bigger ecosystem. If you're using Nim then you're relying on few libraries/tools written by hobbyists who don't have time to ensure they work well, or even more likely you're having to write these yourself.

But the bigger problem is the culture of the Nim community and its leadership. I made a hard decision to stop spending my free time contributing to it a few years ago now and I'm glad I did.

Interesting, well too bad. Personally I find Nim more useful and productive than ever with LLMs.

Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.

Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.

Genuinely curious what is keeping you using Nim. Is it just sunk cost fallacy at this point?

LLMs actually make the case for Nim worse IMO. The language is more expressive than Go and more productive for human coders, but in the age of LLMs this doesn’t matter as much.

And yes, I can confirm that Jester is dead. Surprised Nitter is still using it.

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