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10757 :: Can Nim interact with the hardware at a lower level than the C programming language?

• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-12T06:45:33+01:00] view original

  Or does it have to rely on FFI to use direct memory access and such using C?

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• Araq (orginal) [2023-12-12T07:26:27+01:00] view original

  Direct memory access is possible with Nim, no C required. Inline assembler is available too.

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• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-12T07:47:38+01:00] view original

  Impressive; with an elegant syntax too.

  So, Nim can go as low as C, right? I mean, without using FFI.

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• Araq (orginal) [2023-12-12T07:49:15+01:00] view original

  Yes, ptr UncheckedArray[T] and cast tend to be used for this.

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• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-12T08:01:26+01:00] view original

  So, essentially, Nim is the better replacement to C than Zig (IMO).

  It has a beautiful syntax; well done Nim team!

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• Araq (orginal) [2023-12-12T08:08:54+01:00] view original

  Thanks I guess but it's a weird way of looking at things. Before Nim Pascal/Delphi could be used instead of C, there is also C++, Modula 2, Modula 3, Ada, Oberon. There never was a shortage of PLs that could do what C can do.

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• enthus1ast (orginal) [2023-12-12T08:22:42+01:00] view original

  Zip is not only a programming language, but also a c compiler and a cross compiler toolchain. You can (cross) compile your nim application with zig for a lot of targets.

  This is how i use Zig for the most part actually.

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• Yardanico (orginal) [2023-12-12T08:36:55+01:00] view original

  It's a bit unclear, but yes, Zig bundles Clang and a lot of headers and stuff (like musl, etc) for easy cross-compilation. It's not really dependent on Zig itself (I mean that you can create a separate tool that'll do the same), and usually it's called "zig cc".

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• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-12T08:41:50+01:00] view original

  Nevertheless, I find Nim's syntax a joy to work with.

  May you get a huge load of funding soon (if you are looking for it).

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• mratsim (orginal) [2023-12-12T12:07:35+01:00] view original

  I have a wealth of libraries that Go very low-level, through C or syscalls or direct assembly.

  • https://github.com/mratsim/photon-jit. This is a proof-of-concept JIT assembler. Low-level includes mem-maping executable OS pages to put JIT-ted code in it:
    • https://github.com/mratsim/photon-jit/blob/747ae2d/photon_jit/photon_types.nim#L53-L77
  • https://github.com/mratsim/constantine. This is a high-performance cryptographic library. Due to cryptographic and security consideration like supply chain attacks, it has zero dependencies on Nim standard library or external packages (except for testing).
    • Low-level querying the CPU for hardware capabilities like SHA256: https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/1f3e6b1/constantine/platforms/isa/cpuinfo_x86.nim#L14-L35
    • Compile-time assembler implemented in Nim macros to workaround compilers being bad at addition-with-carry and bigint multiplications: https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/1f3e6b1/constantine/math/arithmetic/assembly/limbs_asm_mul_x86.nim#L57-L92
    • JIT compiler of LLVM IR subsequently used to compile code for Nvidia GPUs: https://github.com/mratsim/constantine/blob/1f3e6b1/constantine/platforms/code_generator/nvidia.nim#L158-L209
  • https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer. This is a tensor / multi-dimensional array library and can interact with Cuda and OpenCL.
    • It uses intrinsics to achieve high-performance in bottlenecks like integer matrix multiplication: https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/9016729/src/arraymancer/laser/simd.nim
    • It can use OpenMP https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/9016729/src/arraymancer/tensor/backend/openmp.nim
    • It can use low-level memory optimization techniques like prefetching, __restrict__, etc: https://github.com/mratsim/laser/blob/e23b5d63f58441968188fb95e16862d1498bb845/laser/compiler_optim_hints.nim

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• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-12T12:22:05+01:00] view original

  I've heard of Arraymancer from this forum and had checked out constantine for encrypting passwords.

  More power to you @mratsim!

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• mratsim (orginal) [2023-12-13T07:35:38+01:00] view original

  had checked out constantine for encrypting passwords.

  At the moment (and likely for a long long time) I don't support this.

  Use a password manager like Keepass that was audited and supports Argon2 or at the very least bcrypt or scrypt.

  OpenSSL also supports Argon2, but good luck with finding the CLI option.

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• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-16T14:34:10+01:00] view original

  I was just looking for one for a web back-end I was thinking of writing using Nim. Do you have any other good suggestion?

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• auxym (orginal) [2023-12-16T17:24:26+01:00] view original

  https://nimble.directory/pkg/nimword was made for this and provides bindings to well know, robust libs (openssl and libsodium).

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• undefined (orginal) [2023-12-28T10:07:30+01:00] view original

  Thanks.

  Will try this out.

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