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Comment by trwired | Hacker News Reader

I am looking for a systems programming language that would work well with battle prooven GUI toolkits such as Qt. Would Nim be a good choice?

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Nim is relatively immature and I would expect you will spend time fighting the FFI. I mean, PyQt is wonderful, brilliant, possibly the best GUI toolkit I've ever used anywhere, and very mature and backed by a company that does nothing else - but I still spent time fighting the FFI.

If you want to play around with the language then great, but I suspect you'll spend more time running into bugs than writing your actual program. Which may be fine; certainly it'll be a learning experience.

Writing Qt-flavored C++ was a lot of fun last I tried it (some five years ago). And now there's QML. Have you tried writing your entire project in Qt? It may be a smoother experience than you think.

I have some experience using C++ with both Qt and wxWidgets, but I am looking for an excuse to learn something new. And a systems language with Python inspired syntax and comparable expressiveness that is suitable for creating GUI apps is something that would definitely make me want to investigate Nim further.

You may be in luck: https://github.com/filcuc/NimQml

Thank you for the link, but I can reasonably expect that Qt bindings for Nim either exist or will become available soon, as most languages that get any traction get them. I still don't know, however, if it's a good choice to try and put a GUI app together in Nim. Will it surprise me with a huge binary, like Rust does? [1] Will it be easy to develop in it on multiple platforms? I can find all those things myself, but in the spirit of what the OP describes as putting the best foot forward, I'd like to be able to quickly assess whether the language is potentially a better choice to solve my next problem than those I already know or am planning to learn.

[1] - http://endl.ch/content/cxx2rust-pains-wrapping-c-rust-exampl...

Having seen multiple young open source projects, like Nim, play themselves out over the course of my many years in the Bitcoin space, I expect the savviest developers at this point to benefit most from Nim by establishing themselves as core contributors.

The devs who got into Bitcoin on the ground floor in 2011 and 2012 are three years later on the most sought after venture backed teams, with the whole world hanging onto their every last word. Young and profoundly promising languages like Nim offer a similar opportunity if you're willing to risk it.

It could very well be better to use the myriad of other, more mature and stable languages to solve truly pressing issues. Nim is very young, and the risk:reward ratio is skewed more towards contributors than users who can't risk bugs.

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