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Looks like comparing apples and oranges. If Nim has a GC it would be more instructive to compare it with another garbage-collected systems language like OCaml.

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Yes and no. In fact, Nim can be used without a GC. Actually the GC of Nim is written in Nim, which certinaly proves the point. Now, it is not really convenient to avoid the GC in Nim, and you certainly do not have the safety features of Rust, but it can be done when needed (and you are still writing in something more productive than C)

What's wrong with comparing a GC language with non-GC language?

Wildly different goals, given that there should be some interesting reason to avoid GC nowadays.

An interesting to reason to avoid GC would be a belief that you could make a usable general-purpose language without GC.

Or having code that's callable from another GC-ed language like Ruby/Python/etc. Two GCs dancing around each other (e.g. Python calling Nim) is a recipe ripe for problems.

How are they "wildly" different. I can see different but "whildly" really?

GC is an implementation detail with some performance characteristics. Nim can turn its GC off. It can do a soft-realtime GC behavior where you limit its maximum time slice.

> Nim can turn its GC off.

At the expense of losing memory safety.

Mostly that we already know what the answer's going to be.

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