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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Having played with both Nim and Rust, I also prefer Nim.

Basically Rust is a slightly more pleasant C++, but still huge, complicated, things break all the time, and there's no IDE support to help you make sense of anything. It's probably more robust, maybe faster as things get big, but I haven't got there yet.

Nim is as easy to write as Python, the toolchain is very easy to set up, creating Nim interfaces (with documentation) to your favourite C or C++ library is dirt simple (thanks to tools that come with the compiler), and the language is shockingly fast.

Right now, it's just so much easier to get things done with Nim. Reminds me of Coffee-Script - because it compiles to another language, you get access to a million libraries and platforms for free.

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It's a shame that it doesn't have the mindshare: 27 nim/nimrod questions on SO, 1548 rust. Still not "notable" enough for a Wikipedia entry. I can see nim getting stuck lingering on the margin like Objective-C did before OSX.

It's possible. I personally just hope that Araq and others keep working on it. Right now it's quite easy to use without a lot of libraries written in Nim, because of interoperability.

Besides, I see Nim more as a 'secret weapon' sort of language, or something that individual programmers use. Rust is more of a 'big idea' language, so it makes sense a corporation is pushing it.

> Besides, I see Nim more as a 'secret weapon' sort of language, or something that individual programmers use. Rust is more of a 'big idea' language, so it makes sense a corporation is pushing it.

I don't think that "big idea" languages [1] are necessarily the provenance of corporations/committees as opposed to individuals. If anything, the opposite tends to be true, as large languages such as C++ and C# have tended to grow to encompass more and more features over time as their feature sets expand to accommodate more and more stakeholders. Rust in particular started out as an individual project, with a set of design constraints—those of low-level memory-safe systems programming—that have remained unchanged throughout its lifetime.

[1] I'm not really a fan of that term anyway, as "big ideas" are just design constraints, things that all languages have. Rust just happens to have a unique (among industry languages, save maybe ATS) set of them.

> Rust is more of a 'big idea' language, so it makes sense a corporation is pushing it.

Araq just announced that Nim has financial backing now: http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/870

Fantastic. And thanks for that link. I was messing around with some 3D stuff in Nim, and he's working on 3D C++ stuff too I see...

Is there a flagship project using Nim ? Rust has Servo. I've read here and there that this is the best way for a language to catch on.

What if that's just because people have fewer problems with Nim than they have with Rust? The number of SO questions is a better measure of how often and how many people run into problems than it is a measure of overall popularity.

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