I find it amazing (for good) that Nim, a language that was made in obscurity by a handful developers managed to be compared to a high visibility language backed by many organizations and people.
Nim seems to be a nice, low-level, gc-ed and practical language. It doesn't do anything radical, it's pretty small and it does what's already there right. It could become big.
This kinda reminds of linux vs minix. Doesn't mean it will play out the same way, but still.
Rust feels a bit difficult to get into right now, but if they smooth over the impractical bits, it could become the systems language in 10 years. Nimrod feels like a faster version of python or ruby, something a lot of people would like to have.
Hell yes!
Nim really looks like it might have the potential to become the "faster Ruby" (or faster Python) that many of us are waiting for.
For all the progress in academic (Rust, Haskell) and special purpose (Go, Dart) languages, a new iteration on the "general purpose workhorse" is more than overdue.
The only language to have entered this "faster, statically typed, and generally less surprising Ruby" niche so far is Go. Other languages which are faster, safer, and saner than either Ruby or Go come with various showstopping problem: Java has too much baggage, Scala and Rust are too difficult, Clojure is too scary-looking, etc. Go, despite being fairly mediocre, it combines some concrete advantages over Ruby with a very low barrier to entry.
Nim, though, looks like it should do this even better. It apparently has the same straightforwardness as Go, similar performance, but with even less verbosity, a more powerful (but not scary!) type system, and comprehensively more modern facilities.
I don't know if Nim has some equivalent to Goroutines, but i think Goroutines are overblown anyway. Go isn't really all that great for concurrency, and the people i know who are using Go aren't using it for concurrency.
I believe that the decisive fronts will be mindshare and tooling.
I have no idea how Nim can build mindshare on the same scale as Go; i don't know if the current level of grassroots interest can grow, or if it needs a corporate backer like Google, a celebrity figurehead like Rob Pike, or some technical hook like Goroutines. Perhaps someone will build something amazing in it, and become a poster child.
Tooling is clearer. Go has some simple, well-liked tooling in the box: go fmt for formatting, go vet for linting, go fix for version upgrades, and go get for dependency management. It also has a bit of a weird story around compiling and linking, but it all works in practice. For Nim to overtake Go, it will need an equally good or better story about all these things. Fortunately, this doesn't seem all that hard; the most important area is, IMHO, dependency management and building complex projects, and Go's tools are pretty poor here. go get is simple, but the lack of versioning is a huge hole. Maybe someone should just write a Gradle plugin for Nim?
http://nim-lang.org/nimc.html#cross-compilation
Since Nim uses C as an intermediate representation, cross-compilation support should be as good as your C compiler's.
Rust's cross-compilation seems to not be that great at the moment. Although i believe that's because it hasn't been done yet, rather than having been done badly.
I don't remember the guy behind Nim doing much trash-talking, which probably helped as well, especially in the long run.
EDIT: fixed derailed sentence.
A lot of devs just want a fast,type safe,memory safe language,that doesn't need a hungry VM to run but is expressive enough so "scripters" feel at home. Why is it so hard to get a language that does that? IDK .
As much as I love all things Haskell, there is no way it fits the "scripters can use it" bill.
some development efforts are just really hard to scale out.
Too bad that AIO and related, necessary primitives were forsaken for other priorities.