nimforum mirror - A fun new experiment

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T15:39:30+01:00] view original

As i've seen there was some interest in it, here is my take on a scripting language written in cooperation with several AI agents playing with Nim. It has been a fun and enjoyable ride so far, there are tons of things that can be improved and fixed, but it is somehow usable for continuing experimenting and i'm generally ok with the state that i decided to open it up.

https://github.com/kunitoki/etch

Enjoy !

Araq (orginal) [2025-11-30T16:21:20+01:00] view original

FWIW you lost me at fn main() -> void {, when your scripting language is more verbose than the production language of my choice (Nim), there is not much "scripting" going on. :P

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T16:45:28+01:00] view original

Well yeah, you can also skip it fn main() {} is enough, was just to show off a bit of it

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T18:16:25+01:00] view original

you lost me

Talking about verbosity, i tested the nim VM. I honestly don't mind the extra -> void :P


| Benchmark             | Etch VM | Etch C | NimScript | VM vs NimScript | C vs NimScript |
| --------------------- | ------- | ------ | --------- | --------------- | -------------- |
| arithmetic_operations | 20.2ms  | 3.0ms  | 852.7ms   | 🟢 42.16×      | 🟢 286.29×    |
| array_operations      | 10.4ms  | 4.5ms  | 395.1ms   | 🟢 38.09×      | 🟢 88.33×     |
| for_loop_print        | 7.7ms   | 9.0ms  | 665.9ms   | 🟢 86.53×      | 🟢 74.37×     |
| function_calls        | 11.1ms  | 3.3ms  | 293.0ms   | 🟢 26.41×      | 🟢 89.35×     |
| math_intensive        | 8.3ms   | 3.8ms  | 249.1ms   | 🟢 30.11×      | 🟢 65.52×     |
| memory_allocation     | 3.8ms   | 2.8ms  | 229.3ms   | 🟢 59.78×      | 🟢 81.61×     |
| nested_loops          | 12.3ms  | 2.7ms  | 249.6ms   | 🟢 20.31×      | 🟢 93.09×     |
| option_operations     | 6.6ms   | 2.6ms  | 471.4ms   | 🟢 71.56×      | 🟢 181.63×    |
| ref_operations        | 16.9ms  | 4.4ms  | 237.7ms   | 🟢 14.06×      | 🟢 53.54×     |
| result_operations     | 20.5ms  | 4.4ms  | 636.7ms   | 🟢 31.12×      | 🟢 145.54×    |
| string_operations     | 5.6ms   | 11.7ms | 247.0ms   | 🟢 44.41×      | 🟢 21.16×     |

Araq (orginal) [2025-11-30T19:05:34+01:00] view original

Nim's VM is known to be rather slow, the primary cause for it is the absymal PNode structure that is required for macros. Nimony doesn't have this problem. I fail to see the connection to the "verbosity" of your language.

treeRepr (orginal) [2025-11-30T19:16:15+01:00] view original

I looked through the repo, impressive work, I dont like the syntax myself, but i can recognize how a high performance scripting language is valuable. You probably should move the example code to the frontpage readme. And how to interop with it, how simple it is. Lua is ass to work with because everything goes through its stack, show examples.

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T19:48:17+01:00] view original

It's not verbose, well not more than nim at least (apart the braces but that is mostly because is written by and targeted to people with C* background writing games), and i don't care 6 more characters if it runs 50 times faster than nim VM regardless of its excuses brought to the table. You seems to care more about superflous things than others...

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T19:49:42+01:00] view original

Thanks for the feedback, will definately work more on highlighting its good parts on the landing page

Araq (orginal) [2025-11-30T20:07:54+01:00] view original

It's not verbose, well not more than nim at least (apart the braces ...

Well these two things cannot both be true at the same time... ;-)

and i don't care 6 more characters if it runs 50 times faster than nim VM regardless of its excuses brought to the table. You seems to care more about superflous things than others...

Maybe, no idea what you care about though. If you don't mind the braces (nothing wrong with that) there are lots of scripting languages that offer decent performance. Sure, you enjoy what you do and learn all sort of useful things while you're at it, have fun.

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T20:18:06+01:00] view original

What i miss from fast scripting languages out there is what i'm missing from compiled languages. We run lua in production and boom, typo error, nil table dereference, out of bounds access... These are all recoverable errors when the script run, but 99% would have been avoided with the use of a type system and a proper compiler doing exhaustive analysis. In this area only Luau from Roblox seems to have progressed (fast interpreted VM evolved from lua but with a separate compiler with a proper type system and static analysis), i don't recall anything else available in this area.

Araq (orginal) [2025-11-30T20:22:17+01:00] view original

Well, there are many JavaScript, wasm engines to choose from. TypeScript adds a type system on top of that, there is also Godot's scripting language, etc etc.

PS: No idea if the benchmarks for the VM reflect reality, I've found the VM to be tedious to measure due to its startup time (it needs to compile system.nim ...)

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T20:26:05+01:00] view original

Which runtimes ? Duktape ? V8 ? Wasmtime ? Wasmer ? Have you even tried them ? :D

Araq (orginal) [2025-11-30T21:22:56+01:00] view original

No, why would I, I don't like braces nor end, remember? It's your job to try them before wasting your time on the N'th iteration of the same ideas.

krakengore (orginal) [2025-11-30T22:06:12+01:00] view original

We don't need to sync our priorities, all good, we each have our hobbies.

enthus1ast (orginal) [2025-12-01T14:37:30+01:00] view original

Nice 👍 will try it definitely!

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