Nim Language Draws from Best of Python, Rust, Go, and Lisp

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3157745/application-development/nim-language-draws-from-best-of-python-rust-go-and-lisp.html

by vasili111 • 9 years ago

64 84 9 years ago

infoworld.com

mixedCase2• 9 years ago

The problem I have with Nim is that it misses the simplicity of Go and the extra safety at high performance of Rust. At least I, personally don't see the need for a middle-of-the-road language.

I wish them however the best of luck. Compiling down to C means being able to leverage a lot of mature tools, and if they manage to simplify a lot of the language they may rival Go for projects when you need high performance but desire to retain high productivity regardless of how big and diverse your dev team is.

beagle3• 9 years ago

If Nim continues at the same pace, it may displace Python.

It is "as fun as" Python to start with, it has the knobs that made python popular in many niches. It has official JS, C, C++ and Objective-C backends (with perfectly compatible and natively fast FFI in each case). It compiles down to small, efficient executables like Go does.

It has some of the best metaprogramming facilities (in a non-lisp language), which makes it possible to introduce "source native" notation for e.g. XML and JSON.

It also has an LLVM backend, though it is not yet complete.

Nim is a big and complicated language, but so is Python. The size of a language itself is not a problem, as Python shows. Unlike C++, you don't have to be familiar with every small metaclass/descriptor/base-class-lookup issue to use the language. I believe Nim shares Python's "it's ok to ignore the details until you need them" feature.

dwringer• 9 years ago

Perhaps it would be more informative to speculate on the reasons why Python would be displaced by any new language, rather than why any given language might displace Python.

bsder• 9 years ago

If Nim continues at the same pace, it may displace Python.

Um, no.

Look at how long it took Python to displace Perl. And Perl was actively shooting itself in the brain for years or that probably wouldn't have happened.

Python is far more embedded in certain areas now than Perl ever was.

rspeer• 9 years ago

I can't imagine a language even starting to displace Python without a good REPL. Not just a hacked-together "lol does this work" REPL, something you can rely on, and preferably something you can use as a Jupyter backend.

coldtea5• 9 years ago

The problem I have with Nim is that it misses the simplicity of Go and the extra safety at high performance of Rust. At least I, personally don't see the need for a middle-of-the-road language.

I'd very much like a more expressive and better designed than Go language, without the ceremony and straight-jacket of Rust.

That could be D or Nim or some schemes, for example, but I also want a community and tooling.

wtetzner2• 9 years ago

OCaml might be another choice.

mixedCase2• 9 years ago

I'd very much like a more expressive and better designed than Go language, without the ceremony and straight-jacket of Rust.

The problem is this mentality is one that produces unmaintainable software in the long run.

In the case of Go, the simplicity of the language can be frustrating when it comes to expressing one's ideas in "clever" ways; but the code you write may be easily grokked by a junior developer that started with Go last week. On the other hand, things like metaprogramming allow you to build a castle of abstractions which you yourself will have trouble navigating after six months without touching the codebase, and will be a pain of legacy code to any other engineer. Sure, you don't have to use all of it at first, or ever, but that's what I mean "in the long run", either you cave in or someone else in your team does.

It's hard to say Go is poorly designed, because it does what it was meant to do extraordinarily well, even if there are a few things that could be even further simplified and yes, things like generics (where the complexity tradeoff is not that high due to its ubiquitous nature) that could be added (and this discussion seems to be back on the table according to Russ Cox).

As for Rust, without all the ceremony you cannot summon the demons that grant you perfect memory safety without paying for GC as well as absence of data races. Nim simply cannot provide this despite all the complexity it comes with, and really, if you're okay with that much complexity you might as well just stick with C++ and the gargantuan momentum behind it. The committee is making strides towards making the language more palatable so the appeal for Nim diminishes with each new release.

zem5• 9 years ago

f# is probably your best bet. ocaml and d are the closest-to-mainstream ones that don't involve a vm, but neither of them has spectacular tooling just yet; f# (on windows) at the least inherits some of the .net tooling and is getting an increasing amount of support from microsoft.

i'm personally enjoying ocaml a lot, but that's because i'm on linux; under windows i'd probably have gone with f# instead.

nimmer2• 9 years ago

"middle-of-the-road" sounds a bit unfair.

Nim compile and execution times are closer to C/C++ than most languages, maybe in the 10 percentile. Its expressiveness is, arguably, close to Python. It compiles to C, Objective-C, javascript, which many other languages do not. The C target runs even on arduino boards.

sqeaky7• 9 years ago

I don't see the appeal of Nim. We have the choice of C++14, Rust and Go for well supported robust languages with different focuses. C++14 has the best execution performance, Rust is the most safe and it seems likely go tries to be the simplest. What does Nim do better than any of these?

Presuming it does do anything better than those learning Nim is hard because the examples are stale and the documentation lacking. I don't mean just the official docs, which might be great, but where are all the answers on SO and community made books or tutorials.

adamnemecek• 9 years ago

Nim is trying to be a better Python I believe.

baldfat• 9 years ago

I have been following Nim and Racket and it really looks like Racket has been gaining more and more momentum.

Really it is a Win/Win both do great things that might be able to fix some of the weakness of Python.

rbehrends14• 9 years ago

C++ and Rust don't have garbage collection, Go's type system is very simplistic. Obviously, depending on what you do, this can be either an advantage or a disadvantage. My point is that there are clear differentiating factors.

The closest competitor for Nim is probably D, not any of the languages you name.

sqeaky7• 9 years ago

The article seemed to describe a high speed native language with garbage collection. I guess that does seem similar to D, but D is much closer to any of the languages I listed with more than 15 years of development and a much smaller list of breaking changes. It also isn't anywhere near as popular as the three I mentioned.

Why does Nim get the attention that D does not? I think Nim only gets attention around here because its new and not because it brings anything directly useful. As long as it is still "new" there is still so much potential.

As for garbage collection, I think you are overestimating its value. There are great resource management schemes in both Rust and C++, and they can each manage much more than just memory. I am only qualified to speak in detail on C++, but if you simply avoid the "new" operator and automatically allocate everything (some say stack allocate), which is the default, then everything is cleaned up for you automatically.

Further down the garbage collection route, if your app doesn't need performance then why not stick with Ruby, Javascript or Python, they are all well supported and provide tons of flexibility and libraries. If you need performance, why settle for have measures why not go for C++, Rust or one of the blazing fast fully native languages without GC (even one of the really fast ones with GC like Haskell or Java)? I see the space between them filling up with a ton of languages that seem hard to distinguish. Nim looks like just another, piling into this gap that swallows otherwise decent languages like D, cyclone, darkbasic, pascal, and .Net language that isn't C# and so many other languages that I cannot count them.

rurban2• 9 years ago

Rust is not safe, and pretty slow. Go is really very simplistic. C++ got better but is still a horror show.

Closest competitors would be D, Felix, Crystal (for ruby folks) and pony (for Erlang/Scala folks).

coldtea5• 9 years ago

I don't see the appeal of Nim. We have the choice of C++14, Rust and Go for well supported robust languages with different focuses. C++14 has the best execution performance, Rust is the most safe and it seems likely go tries to be the simplest. What does Nim do better than any of these?

Well, C++ is bloated and with tons of tricky parts, Rust has lots of ceremony and head-scratching to fit your programs into its "lifetimes" model, and Go is lacking expressive power and has several bad decisions baked in (possible forever).

sqeaky7• 9 years ago

None of these things say why Nim is good. All of these languages, despite all these failings, have been used to good effect. Why is Nim good, what does it do that makes it better where these fail?

ElectronCharge2• 9 years ago

"We have the choice of C++14, Rust and Go for well supported robust languages with different focuses."

Don't forget Swift. I think it outshines all of the above (and there is active discussion of adopting ownership concepts similar to Rust's).

Swift is already highly optimized. I found this article to be very interesting:

https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/2016/05/19/random-numbers...

TL;DR: 'Both the C and Swift are now the same. I don’t just mean “they take the same time”, I mean they are compiled to literally the same instructions.'

Initially the Swift Mersenne Twister code was faster, but he was able to apply an optimization to the C code that made it identical.

ElectronCharge2• 9 years ago

To whoever downvoted the above without replying: you are intellectually bereft. ;-)

dom963• 9 years ago

What does Nim do better than any of these?

Metaprogramming, and it's not just about how powerful it is. Metaprogramming in Nim is easy, safe, and powerful.

You mention a lot of extremes: Go is simplest, Rust is the most safe, C++14 has the best execution performance. These extremes have trade-offs: Go's lack of generics mean that you end up writing a ton of unsafe boilerplate code, Rust's safety means that you have to spend extra time wrapping your head around lifetimes, C++'s best execution performance means that you have to deal with memory manually and in an unsafe manner.

These trade-offs are debatable, but my point is this: what if I want a language that is well balanced? Nim may not be as simple as Go, but it's definitely simpler than C++ and Rust. Nim may not be as safe as Rust, but only when you decide to manage memory manually, which is rarely necessary and when using Nim's GC it is just as safe as Rust. Nim compiles to C/C++ so its performance is identical in many cases.

The initial idea behind Nim was to have a small core language with a powerful metaprogramming system for expansion. Perhaps we have strayed from this vision a little bit, but it is still true. And we do aim to refocus towards it.

Drup2• 9 years ago

Nim always looked to me as a modern version of OCaml made by someone who has no idea how to do static type systems properly. The language as a whole might have a nice feeling and convenient features, but the type system is really not good ... D's type system, at least, is better designed.

On the other hand, I always considered Rust as the result of an ML programmer looking at C++ and thinking "this is bullshit, I can do it cleaner".

I might have a very ML view of the programming world, but that's ok, most other people have an ALGOL/C view of it. ;)

jackmott• 9 years ago

yeah i have fever dreams of C and ML having some sort of super baby. rust and nim are close but not quite

yawaramin2• 9 years ago

I dream of something like https://github.com/pikatchu/LinearML one day coming into the scene.

zem5• 9 years ago

some others worth checking out (all largely single-developer efforts):

http://www.ats-lang.org/ [ml + c + everything dialled up to eleven. linear and dependent types. comes out of academia, but under active development and slowly beginning to gather a community.]

https://eigenstate.org/myrddin/ [not really familiar with this one but it looks interetsing. close to the metal, has pattern matching over algebraic datatypes but seems more towards the c than the ml end of the spectrum from the brief glance i took.]

http://mythryl.org/ [never took off, sadly; i really liked the looks of this one and its ambitious goals. strong sml influence, with better posix integration and some c-like surface features. developer is currently battling cancer: http://mythryl.org/pipermail/mythryl/2016-April/000942.html]

http://felix-lang.org/ [spawn of ml + c++ rather than ml + c. under enthusiastic if haphazard development.]

there have been a few others i've seen pop up over the years; i keep meaning to make a website or at least a github awesome-style list cataloguing and tracking them.

mirekrusin• 9 years ago

Crystal [1] seems to be nice-shaping language with good (algebraic) type system.

[1] https://crystal-lang.org/

zzzcpan• 9 years ago

most other people have an ALGOL/C view

Maybe in the past, but not today. Today the perspective is from the very high level dynamically typed languages. Encoding things into types is out of the question.

srean• 9 years ago

The Felix language may fit your taste then http://felix-lang.org/ Its related to C++ somewhat in the way say Scala is related to Java.

Its been around for a while. Felix has an ML like type system (stronger in fact), has pattern matching, has coroutines / fibers, and was designed to have a FFI less interop with C++ libraries. Very fast too.

dom963• 9 years ago

Can you explain what about Nim's type system is not good?

feduzi• 9 years ago

It is more an expression of confusion rather than type system quality evaluation, but why does JSON parser's implementation returns its own types like JsonNode? Why doesn't it just return core types like:

* JSON String -> NIM String

* JSON Object -> NIM Hash

* and so on...

I've also had the same question when looking at https://crystal-lang.org.

PS: I do not claim Nim's type system to be bad as I do not have an exact counterexample of a "better" type system.

amyjess• 9 years ago

There's also a lot of Modula-3 in there. Actually, the whole language is full of Pascal-isms, but I'm not sure how many come directly from Pascal and how many come via Modula-3.

alexeiz• 9 years ago

I don't know about Nim, but Infoworld is a pile of garbage.

rurban2• 9 years ago

But Wikipedia editors decided it is not notable, and speedy deleted it under Nimrod.

After that debacle, Wikipedia decided Nim is finally good enough for them, and they even link now Nimrod_(programming_language) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_(programming_language)

Nim Language Draws from Best of Python, Rust, Go, and Lisp

Related Stories