When searching for info on chronos I came across @zensins (long) essay here (https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/13322#80975) and found my impressions confirmed.
Now, to be fair, I'm not deep into Nim since quite some time.
Here is what I see:
Nim has become a confusing maze, in particular wrt to multi-threading an async. BS like "if using X lib, do not use Y and do use commandline switch Z". That may be acceptable for hardcore Nim fans but is apalling to the average developer. Also, while documentation is quite OK for Nim itself, I've seen plenty modules with poor to utterly crappy/meager or next to no documentation.
With chronos, for example, the documentation is very meager. So I looked at the source code - to find many procs having not even a fu**ing single descriptive line. To make it worse the few examples provided are quite minimalistic. Just one example: how to set a header for a client request?
All in all, I always (mis?-)took Nim to be a language with which simple things were simple and, if one was inclined to do so, one could dive deeper and do more complex things.
Why the hell should I use a language that isn't mainstream yet (read: far, far less code and docu to be found than for say, C or Pascal or ...) and at the end of the day is NOT simpler to work in than C?
I'm more and more under the impression that Nim is not on its way towards a serious widely used language (kindly note that when I say "Nim" I actually mean the whole 'eco-system' incl. tools and libraries).
Recently @Araq told me that 'Nimony' likely is what I want and 'Nim 3.x'. Sorry Araq, no, it highly likely (as in "almost certainly") will not. Because I've lost my trust in your ability to guide your baby well through the woods. Too many experiments, too many cooks in the kitchen. Don't get me wrong, I know that programming languages don't fall from trees, they require repeated attempts and experiments. But NOT in a way that suggests actual usability and lures people into actually using it instead of clearly putting a "Carefu! Experimental!!" label on top.
Well noted, I'm not cynical sarcastic or ill-willed in the least while writing this! I'm sad. I'm sad because a project I once had high hopes for and trust in increasingly looks derailed and out of control.
Angry I'm only at those who provide next to no docu and basically seem to follow the line "FU! I'm doing this only for myself and/or for fun".
I'm back to Ada and C and will only occasionally "play" with Nim. Who knows, maybe in a couple of years it will be actually usable and well documented. Hope one can ...
P.S. and à propos C: The moment the straw broke was when I build a library in C and it was less painful than my bloody cumbersome and unnerving Nim attempt and the overall dev experience was better.
Yes, @Araq,
but with Nim the chance - sadly - is much, much higher to encounter libx with docu between non-existing and poor, including - again, sadly - libs that seem to be important and often mentioned.
Kindly note that I expressly said that Nim itself is decently (albeit far from perfectly) documented, so that "arrow" wasn't targetting you, or only insofar as you seem to welcome pretty much everything as "contribution". Being at that, tools and libs are important for a language to get wide acceptance.
Why such entitlement?
If you can make a better async lib or improve chronos, go ahead. If some libraries you need are missing in nim, wrap a C library or use C if wrapping is more effort than the benefit of using nim in the project. Why the drama?
This guy usually entitled and not interested in "being the change you want to see". See the last thread he created https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/13407#81396
I knew it was him by the tone not the username.
I have a completely different experience with Nim 🤷 Somehow I'm seeing well maintained and documented libs with open-minded and friendly people maintaining and developing them.
If you don't like something, just don't use it. Or, if you care enough, so the actual improvement you want to see.
We have a saying in Russian: a pig will always find dirt. It's a bit rude but the tone set in this thread is rude so I guess it fits.