Why Use Nim over C#?

by planetis • 3 years ago

45 56 3 years ago

There are literally millions of professional developers using C#. Any problem you run into has a solution documented online.

Languages like Nim are a good choice for developers who need the adrenaline rush of dealing with complicated problems alone.

oynqr• 3 years ago

Damn, didn't know C# can solve the halting problem.

osivat• 3 years ago

Of course it can, this simple feature has been in Visual Studio Enterprise for more than a year.

guilhas2• 3 years ago

One problem with the c#/dotnet ecosystem is there are too many answers online for different versions

c#, records, EF6, EF core, EF7, net4.8, net standard, net core, net6, webforms, blazor, web api, web mvc, razor, identity core, legacy, UI, dotnet cli, visual studio, vscode, nuget, CMD, powershell...

rjh29• 3 years ago

What is better, too many options or barely any?

koenvdb• 3 years ago

Most of the time the answers are interchangable. There are a few exceptions but then you just look for "Specific problem .Net6" for example.

jackmott422• 3 years ago

you listed 3 versions of C# in that list, and they are all as similar as versions of any other language are.

sebazzz2• 3 years ago

I bet you I'll love any library in Node.js or the ecosystem itself. That's significantly worse.

silon42• 3 years ago

It's more or less true for Java... but in my experience, less true for c#.

bilekas3• 3 years ago

but i do like how nim programs consistently have few lines of code than the same program in really most other languages which seems like a good thing

Interesting take.. I could share some codeGolf languages that you might like to play with in that case!

That said there are a few fallacies in the comments also that bother me a bit. Specifically the assumption that 'once its closer to C its automatically more performant.'

Wild comments too like : `Nim runs on many more platforms than C#`

Without being specific this claim is just weird..

beware though that usually the people who wrote the benchmarks might not be experts on Nim

So you need to be an expert to benchmark it.. Red flag.

jb19913• 3 years ago

You can write fast or slow code in any language, typically people who understand the language very well are the ones who can write performant code, regardless of language. All those benchmark games out there for dozens of languages are proof of that.

kitd3• 3 years ago

Not an expert, but your comparisons need to be apples-to-apples. An expert-tuned C# impl v a naive Nim impl isn't a good benchmark.

bilekas3• 3 years ago

If I'm benchmarking (not perf testing) a language with some nuances I'm not too familiar with, I would stick some simple implementations of core workings. If those simple tasks are `supposed` to be done a `special` way, then I'm already not interested.

Why should I need to learn semi-workarounds just to achieve the basics.

shaunsingh02072• 3 years ago

I didn't get why fewer lines of code is better. I don't choose rust because its "shorter", far from it, if anything I choose rust because its very verbose with its syntax, but that syntax conveys a lot of information.

Another comment in the above thread mentioned that "c-like performance is easily reachable with c2nim, or inline assembly" well then thats not really the performance of nim is it, thats the performance of assembly ...

dmitriid2• 3 years ago

I didn't get why fewer lines of code is better.

There have been a few studies showing that bugs-per-line-of-code is pretty consistent from language to language. So, if you can reduce the number of lines needed, you reduce the number of bugs.

There are also surely diminishing returns

Octoth0rpe• 3 years ago

This is a pretty dumb/blunt justification, but there is _some_ truth to it: The number of bugs in a program correlates roughly to the number of lines in that program, irrespective of language. Ergo, if some language lets you accomplish your goal in 30% fewer lines, you will have 30% fewer bugs.

The huge caveats are at a minimum that you're writing the code idiomatically (ie not putting your entire program on a single line), that it also strongly depends on developer proficiency with the language (likely lower for a newer language like nim), whether the problem you're solving is well understood, etc

jackmott422• 3 years ago

There is a lot of data showing less lines of codes correlates with less bugs. I don't know if that works cross languages, like a language that requires annotations to help ensure correctness requires more lines thus does it correlate with fewer bugs than python? don't know.

but nim and C# have similar levels of safety

xupybd• 3 years ago

Does Nim really have no competition in the meta programming space? I assumed Haskell would do well there?

jb19913• 3 years ago

Also zig, meta programming is one of its key features from what I understand.

kitd3• 3 years ago

D too. D templates are dangerously easy to use.

rakoo• 3 years ago

ruby is notorious/famous for monkeypatching everything and the simplicity of creating DSLs

freilanzer2• 3 years ago

Presumably you're only asking about statically typed languages, right? Otherwise Julia, and every Lisp come to mind. Especially compared to Lisp all other languages are inferior when it comes to meta programming.

francisl• 3 years ago

swift and kotlin are slowly getting there.

gigatexal• 3 years ago

For game dev? Use C#. It’s got all the bindings to the engines and other such things you’ll need.

toastal• 3 years ago

You can use F#, but this implores that we get more engines if all they are compatible with is Microsoft .NET.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

And even then, don't forget that from .NET team's point of view, F# is a community language that gets to be on .NET SDK.

initplus• 3 years ago

F# is a great language, but it somewhat waters down its strengths to bolt it to a giant hulking lump of C++ full of mutable state. Interacting with an impure api means throwing out many of the advantages of (mostly) pure programming.

DeathArrow2• 3 years ago

I currently use C# for most of my work. I would love to use Nim, as I like its design, its simplicity, its performance and the fact that it doesn't enforce OOP, but here are the problems:

-not enough libraries

-not enough frameworks

-not enough support

was_a_dev• 3 years ago

Classic chicken and egg

dmitriid2• 3 years ago

Also known as Crossing the Chasm: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/book-summary-crossing-the-chasm...

cosmicradiance• 3 years ago

above 3 boils down to - not enough enterprise backing

WithinReason2• 3 years ago

I didn't realize you can mix Nim an Assembler like this:

https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/1cb6c3d/constant...

Santosh83• 3 years ago

But if you use windows, there is no inline assembly so shrug.

(in Nim presumably)

Can anyone say why?

cardanome2• 3 years ago

C# is an excellent language with an great ecosystem and lots of jobs available. Also, if you ever want to go a bit more functional, F# is excellent.

My personal reason for avoiding it is purely political: I don't trust Microsoft. I try to not rely on languages that are controlled by a single monopolistic corporations. Considering the recent case of the golang compiler planning on getting telemetry, I feel validated in that decision.

As for game development, I think the game engine of choice will already dictate what one should learn.

Unity is still king of casual and mobile games, so if that is your niche, learning C# is a no-brainer. Plus Godot has decent C# support now, if you ever need to change horses.

As for more complex 3d games, Unreal 5 is just insanely good. Nanite and Lumen offer tremendous improvements in both development experience and end result. Here learning some C++ is advised but funny enough, there are actually Nim bindings as well. If you don't mind getting into somewhat untested waters, Nim might be a very good choice here.

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

Considering the recent case of the golang compiler getting telemetry

Is this for certain? I thought this was still in the discussion phase.

cardanome2• 3 years ago

I should have phrased that as "planning to".

After the significant push-back it seems like are considering doing only opt-in telemetry[1] which would be acceptable.

So not that bad for now but who knows. Once telemetry is in place, they might try to change it to opt-out at a later date when less push-back is expected. Still setting a problematic precedent and shows why corporate control about a programming language might become problematic.

[1] https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-opt-in

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

When those corporations not put the money into the work, even free beer C and C++ compilers suffer, see clang current state of ISO support.

brudgers• 3 years ago

Not trying to change your politics. People hate Microsoft for many reasons.

C# has an ECMA standard (334).

I.E. it has a public specification.

Some versions also have an ISO Standard.

https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standard...

sebazzz2• 3 years ago

I try to not rely on languages that are controlled by a single monopolistic corporations

Only languages or frameworks too? Because there aren't many which aren't controlled by a single entity. Sometimes it is just not that obvious.

scotty79• 3 years ago

My main reason for using C# is that's it's nice enough but Visual Studio feels amazing.

diarrhea• 3 years ago

I have the opposite stance. Visual Studio is my primary dislike in working with C#. It's mighty, I'll give it that. The debugging experience is strong. But it's slow, sluggish, components or itself crash sporadically; the extension ecosystem isn't great.

Working with containers/docker is a bit painful, too: as with all things Microsoft, there are layers of indirection to just make it work™. While it does, it's wonderful. Almost inevitably however, one runs into edge cases that are impossible to solve, because the config you need hasn't been surfaced to the GUI. That's where I prefer more 'hackable' IDEs like VSCode. In these situations, it might just allow you to drop a line of bash into some JSON config. Simple and works, no GUI work from the devs required.

One my of favorite pet peeves is running unit tests in parallel from inside VS, using the GUI/shortcuts. The setting for running unit tests in parallel is a nested setting, only accessible via GUI. Running unit tests in sequence is incredibly slow in our case (and when would you ever want unit tests _not_ run in parallel?). The setting is then stored somewhere in the `.vs/` directory, in _binary files_. You cannot version control them, and `git clean` regularly knocks that directory out, wiping the setting. Annoying, but not annoying enough to do anything about!

_hao• 3 years ago

I agree with you around VS and I use it all the time. The problem is that Rider for example is the same. I've had the chance to do a project with Rider recently and I have to say performance-wise both VS and Rider are just slow and prone to crashes and random errors. It's true they offer immense power. Debugging and profiling is unmatched in both IDEs. However, what I'd like is a more modular approach in both of them where I can disable certain things to take a load off the dev experience. I'm not sure if their architecture would allow for such a change, but I'd love to see it.

I'm back to my usual VSCode setup now for .NET/C# work, but there even though I have more than 50 extensions, they are all enabled on per-project basis so the experience is pretty light. I still have to boot up VS/Rider from time to time, but it won't be my first choice.

AdrianB12• 3 years ago

Stupid question of the week that came to me after reading this: is there any language that compiles to dot net intermediate language, so it runs on do net like C# but with a different syntax like Nim? There are advantages and disadvantages, I am just curious if anyone wanted to go this way.

freilanzer2• 3 years ago

F#?

ifdefdebug• 3 years ago

Take a look at F#

AdrianB12• 3 years ago

F# is also Microsoft, is it? I am thinking about third parties that want to use the dot net ecosystem with their own languages.

dvdkon• 3 years ago

There's one area where Nim is better than most alternatives, especially those with a separate required runtime, and that is binary size. I write quick scripts and daemons with Nim, knowing that they won't take up space on my disk or in RAM.

DeathArrow2• 3 years ago

Also, this might be an interesting read: https://mode80.github.io/7-langs-in-12-months.html

Why Use Nim over C#?

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