I just realized something:
Nim is like a faster Python or a better Go lang
It's not really competing in quite the same space as say, D or Rust. It's like a statically typed scripting language.
It's not really competing in quite the same space as say, D or Rust. It's like a statically typed scripting language.
It's easy to write (a) an unsafe language that has no GC, or (b) a safe language that relies on GC for safety. It's also easy to write a language that is in category (b) but lets you drop down to category (a) in an unsafe dialect. It's a very difficult problem to write a safe language that does not rely on GC, and I know of no other industry language that has done it. Unfortunately, people often lump Rust into categories (a) or (b), without realizing that what makes it interesting is that it isn't in either. Nim may be in category (b) (if the thread safety issues in the GC have been solved, or you use Boehm, or your app is solely single-threaded) with the ability to drop down to category (a), but it is not in Rust's category.
While Ada doesn't provide the parallelism safety mecanisms from Rust, is is pretty much a safe systems programming language, specially the SPARK dialect.
And I do conceed that using RAII or memory pools is a bit more cumbersome than in Rust.
EDIT: Forgot to add that for me systems programming safety has been for a long time what Modula-3, Oberon and Ada offer. Only recently it became clear to me that Rust safety module is more broad.
In general Ada code, deallocation is considered unsafe and requires specializing the Unchecked_Deallocation() procedure. This is because Ada 83 allowed for optional GC.
In Ada 83, the safe alternative was to use memory pools.
With the newer revisions, support was added for RAII and Ada the ability to define custom refereced counted data structures, similar to how they are doing in C++.
So speaking of Ada 2012, you can get Ada's safety in terms of contracts, data types, numeric ranges, constrained types, access types (Ada pointers).
For heap related safety, it is possible if RAII, memory pools or RC access types are used. But like C++, this is one area where the compiler doesn't force the developer to use it.
However few people will ever need this feature, and erlang/elixir probably does it better, though at a the cost of speed.
Rust is objectively much better, but I suspect that for the next 5 years, Rust will only remain popular for systems programming but not application/web dev, and Go will only remain popular for what it's currently doing but not systems programming (with some semi-exceptions like Docker and Kubernetes, though that's not really systems programming).
It's useful to distinguish between "the language" and "the tool". Some programming languages are terrible from a language design perspective (PHP, JavaScript, MATLAB), but they still have great tools (IDEs, build tools, package managers) and libraries to help programmers create good and interesting software.
That's not an advantage
Yes it is. I have been programming Python, C++, Java and C# over the last 10 years.
Python's convention for white-space beats the other ones hands down both when writing and reading large code bases.
It is a mistake to conclude that because language X has feature Y, the entire community around language X thinks that feature Y is a positive feature.
I can tell by the downvotes. Also, you can't prove that.
Go is much more mature than Nim and encapsulates a huge amount of thinking and experience in language and compiler design. Nim would like to be Go. But it isn't.