Nim partners with Status.im

https://nim-lang.org/blog/2018/08/07/nim-partners-with-status.html?ref=hn

by dom96 • 8 years ago

174 55 8 years ago

nim-lang.org

FridgeSeal• 8 years ago

That’s awesome, congratulations Nim team!

partisan• 8 years ago

This is great news. Nim (and the team working on it) deserves much support and praise.

It is a language that enables C/C++ programmers to be more productive and makes performant programming approachable for beginners as well.

ankitbgupta3• 8 years ago

Amazing. Interesting to see programming language teams getting together with web3.0 teams.

prideout• 8 years ago

I've played with Nim, I think it's great and deserves more attention. Especially in the scientific computing and gamedev communities.

It has Python-like terseness, static typing, and simple C interop.

CharlesW• 8 years ago

Nim is new to me and I'm missing the "why" of it. From the website, I'm getting "we like Python but wanted to compile to native code and JavaScript". Is that fair?

dom965• 8 years ago

That's why I started using it.

But Nim is much more than just this, it's more like "We like Python, but we also like static typing, efficient and dependency-free programs, super easy C/C++ FFI and metaprogramming. We also like to write all our software in the same programming language so we compile to JavaScript" :)

wuschel2• 8 years ago

How is the concurrency story with Nim. I know that this is a repeating question, just wondering how well it works and how safe it is.

I am still eyeballing Pony-lang for it's design choices, but development seems to have slowed down there.

ilovecaching2• 8 years ago

This is literally Go, save the fact that it compiles to WA instead of JS.

jhasse2• 8 years ago

super easy C/C++ FFI

There's a HUGE difference between a C FFI and a C++ FFI. I doubt that Nim makes the latter easy (name mangling, exceptions, STL, ...).

nicoburns• 8 years ago

That seems about right. Another big benefit of this is performace. Nim is a lot faster than python.

Symmetry• 8 years ago

"A performant but garbage collected language with nice syntax that compiles to C. Plus hygienic macros."

dvfjsdhgfv2• 8 years ago

More or less - easy and intuitive like Python (or better), fast almost like C.

mlthoughts20184• 8 years ago

I would say Nim is far less intuitive than Python, and it’s better to only iteratively refactor occasional subsets of your code for heavy performance, and not presume you need all parts to have C-like speed (you don’t).

This is why I think choosing to begin a project in Nim (or C++), is a form of drastic premature optimization, compared with Python and iterative usage of Cython.

gooseus• 8 years ago

Way to go team Nim!

I was dabbling in this community almost a year ago before being distracted by work/life, very fun and supportive.

Still enjoy wearing my Nim t-shirt and look forward to returning to some dabbling in the (hopefully near) future.

gammateam2• 8 years ago

So nobody is going to comment on why Status.im even exists? 100m dollars for an "open source mobile dApp browser" and messaging system, when dApp browsers are dime a dozen, open source, and pretty good!

Trust Wallet any one? Toshi?

Hopefully all those bucks can be used to propel development of other things, like with Nim and a real sharding ecosystem.

zacharycarter• 8 years ago

I know a lot about Nim, not nearly as much about crypto / Status, but their blog does reveal quite a bit of information about what they're trying to accomplish.

yenda• 8 years ago

The two wallets you mention are not running an ethereum like client on the phone and are therefore depending on third parties to get access to the ethereum network.

d357r0y3r• 8 years ago

Running a node on a phone sounds like a horrible idea. Why would this be desirable?

This is a solved problem and I never understand why people keep going back to it. Host a node or use a public node. Use a local wallet to do signing and depend on the public node for RPC calls. The vast majority of users and clients do not need to be dealing with Ethereum nodes on their own devices, they just need good key management systems.

cocktailpeanuts• 8 years ago

i had to lol at this comment.

So you think Apple and Google don't count as a "third party"? What will happen when they kick them off the app store? How else will they communicate through push notification WITHOUT going through FCM or APNS?

The whole premise is completely flawed and naive if they're trying to build a truly "decentralized browser". The only way to make something truly decentralized on mobile is if you have the capacity to build your own phone and distribute it to wide audience. Otherwise you are relying on "3rd parties" like Apple and Google. In fact YOU are the "3rd party" that can be always cut off from users.

woah• 8 years ago

They raised at the peak of the 2017 ico frenzy. Now they are funding open source projects for lack of anything better to do with the money. Not a bad outcome. Right time, right marketing strategy. Their app is not yet in the App Store today.

smnplk• 8 years ago

IIRC they raised around 200 million at the time. It would be nice if they throw some money at Clojure/script too , because they depend on it heavily.

Nimitz14• 8 years ago

Awesome!

sdegutis• 8 years ago

This is great news Dominik. I remember speaking to you guys in your IRC channel a few years ago about Nim, and you all answered my questions and criticisms very professionally, and I really liked the direction you have all taken with Nim. This post is a good reminder to write something fun in it tonight. :)

mlevental• 8 years ago

very cool. hopefully you guys take off. i love python for being productive but static typing and easier distribution (compiling down to binary) are killer features for a language with similar semantics/expressiveness.

ilaksh• 8 years ago

Nim is still the best language I know of in terms of clean code, speed, metaprogramming, FFI, etc.

And I think a sharded and/or light client/browser for Ethereum could actually replace banking and potentially a ton of other applications if it becomes popular. The trick will be all of the competition in terms of clients.

Rather than Dapp browsers I would like to see a lightweight mobile client library and server combo that would allow me to just build a freestanding app. Maybe just a lightweight client rather than an actual node. Or maybe have a way to install the ethereum node server only if it's not already there.

But with when sharding actually comes online I am very hopeful that Ethereum will blow up. So I may buy some more Ether tonight.

k__3• 8 years ago

I'd wish there was a Rust with Nim syntax, haha.

creatornator• 8 years ago

I suppose something close might be OCAML or Haskell, since they have similar type safety to Rust (whose syntax is loosely based on OCAML from what I understand) but have some nice features that Python and Nim use like list comprehensions and generators, lazy evaluating, etc. But also with Rust macros you can sort of make your own sub-DSL's which add some of those features.

gregn610• 8 years ago

Is there a transpiling / migration story for a python code base into Nim? I briefly looked at Nuitka to get to a dependency free binary from python but this could be another approach.

mlthoughts20184• 8 years ago

Just use Cython in that case.

dom965• 8 years ago

There is some experimental stuff, py2nim for example: https://github.com/metacraft-labs/py2nim

Nim partners with Status.im

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