nimforum mirror - How ready is Nim (and the ecosystem) for front-end web development?

DeletedUser (orginal) [2023-10-04T20:18:43+02:00] view original

Let's say that I want to replace JavaScript with Nim as my front-end development language. How ready is Nim and the ecosystem for this?

I tried playing with Karax and a couple of days ago I discovered Nimja. However, I haven't experimented with them enough to conclude on this. Are Nim and its ecosystem ready for all front-end needs (CSR, SSR, SSG etc.)?

I don't mind transpiling stuff to JS (almost all the other languages do that I guess). I just wanted to know how mature Nim and its ecosystem in this regard.

I just don't want to write JavaScript or think logically in it ever again (I don't hate the language). I'm okay with CSS; though it would be lovely if we can have some CSS-in-Nim...haha!

Araq (orginal) [2023-10-05T06:30:17+02:00] view original

This forum software (as bad as it might seem?) is written in Nim with Karax. The ecosystem is ready. Ymmv.

PS: "transpiling" is an illdefined term and even worse: it's an ugly word.

xigoi (orginal) [2023-10-05T09:03:30+02:00] view original

If you don't mind people on a slow data connection taking several minutes to load your website, you can definitely use Nim.

Araq (orginal) [2023-10-05T09:13:51+02:00] view original

The forum does not take several minutes to load...

enthus1ast (orginal) [2023-10-05T09:39:53+02:00] view original

Also nitter.net is done in nim!

I've done alot of small stuff in nimja (obviously) and for this it's quite nice. For larger stuff the compile cycle sometimes is a little annoying. So I can recommend a watcher that recompile your stuff on change for example: https://github.com/treeform/guardmons/blob/master/src/guardmons/watchmon.nim

dissolved_girl (orginal) [2023-10-05T10:19:50+02:00] view original

What makes you say this? On a regular 2G connection and no cache, this page takes 15 seconds to load, which is fairly acceptable (nowhere near "several minutes"), and a lot of time is spent on loading recaptcha, fonts, avatars from gravatar, etc. Having cache reduces loading times to nearly zero since only API requests need to be performed.

DeletedUser (orginal) [2023-10-05T13:26:43+02:00] view original

Does anyone have any benchmarks done with Nim front-end stuff against front-end libraries/frameworks from the JavaScript ecosystem? Something against React would suffice.

cmc (orginal) [2023-10-05T15:41:09+02:00] view original

I'd say it is completely ready right now as long as you are willing to read some source code of libraries to get information when documentation is missing. Also, the Nim channel on matrix is a great way to get quick help, people there are amazing.

DeletedUser (orginal) [2023-10-05T17:19:16+02:00] view original

Got ya. Thanks @cmc

I'd only been active on Discord. But I had not started doing front-end stuff with Nim.

enthus1ast (orginal) [2023-10-05T19:28:35+02:00] view original

The nim main channel (and some others) are bridged from matrix to discord

jmgomez (orginal) [2023-10-06T09:49:41+02:00] view original

Although slow recompile

How long does it takes for you? Have you considered split in libraries/modules?

xigoi (orginal) [2023-10-06T13:18:35+02:00] view original

Several minutes is an exaggeration, but the truth is that, by my measurement, the minified JS code produced by Nim is about 7 times the size of the unminified Nim source code. I should do a proper benchmark at some point. For a complex web app, that could be several megabytes, which is much larger than properly written JavaScript. With 0.1 MB/s, which is common on 2G networks, a 6 MB app is going to take a full minute to load – having to redo it from the start if the network gets interrupted.

enthus1ast (orginal) [2023-10-06T13:26:37+02:00] view original

One option is to minify sure, another (or in addition) is to enable compression in your upstream proxy

enthus1ast (orginal) [2023-10-06T13:28:08+02:00] view original

Also, nothing stops you to actually run a js minifier in your "push to production" pipeline.

Araq (orginal) [2023-10-06T14:44:01+02:00] view original

For a complex web app, that could be several megabytes, ...

Pure speculation and seems to be an unrealistic extrapolation.

dissolved_girl (orginal) [2023-10-06T23:44:01+02:00] view original

Okay but who cares about 2G networks anyways? Most carriers don't even support that nowadays. Should we keep worrying about stuff not fitting on floppy drives?

alexeypetrushin (orginal) [2023-10-07T09:52:50+02:00] view original

[quote]How long does it takes for you? Have you considered split in libraries/modules? It is a surprise to me to hear that because js is just one step[/quote]Around 20sec to recompile. As Araq mentioned, I use conditional compile in html templates heavily, maybe it slows down compilation. Also, it's not JS, it's compiled to standard C code, not JS code. It's a hybrid framework, it creates illusion as if it's the JS App, when in reality everything happens on the server. I'm going to address these two issues, a) remove conditional compile b) switch from C-runtime to JS-runtime. We'll see, maybe indeed it will be faster.

xigoi (orginal) [2023-10-07T13:23:41+02:00] view original

When travelling, I still often go through places that only have a 2G connection.

DeletedUser (orginal) [2023-10-07T14:58:11+02:00] view original

I just wish for the day, "JavaScript everywhere" (for web development) is replaced by "Nim everywhere".

Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

10528 :: How ready is Nim (and the ecosystem) for front-end web development?