Hello Nim community,
I love this language very much and I use it now in almost all my personal projects, it can be on another level, so I’ve been following developments around CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) and I believe there may be an interesting opportunity for Nim to position itself early in a potentially important hardware shift.
For anyone unfamiliar, CHERI is a CPU architecture extension (currently implemented on platforms like CHERI-RISC-V and ARM Morello) that replaces traditional pointers with capabilities that include bounds, permissions, and integrity tags enforced by hardware.
Instead of a pointer being just an integer address, a CHERI capability carries metadata that defines:
the valid memory bounds
permissions (read/write/execute)
a hardware-protected tag ensuring the pointer is valid
Every memory access is checked by hardware, which means many classes of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows can be eliminated at the architectural level.
In other words, memory safety moves from software to hardware.
This opens an interesting ecosystem question:
Which programming languages will become the “natural languages” for CHERI-style systems?
Right now the conversation is dominated by:
Rust
C/C++ adaptations via LLVM
But Nim might have several advantages here:
• systems-level performance • explicit control over memory • compile-time metaprogramming • clean integration with C/LLVM ecosystems • ability to experiment quickly with new runtime or ABI models
A language that embraces CHERI concepts early could potentially:
• provide native abstractions for capabilities • build safe capability-aware containers and APIs • integrate CHERI permissions into its type system or libraries • target CHERI platforms as a first-class compilation target
In other words, Nim could become one of the first high-level systems languages designed around capability hardware.
Historically, being early in an architectural transition can matter a lot.
If CHERI becomes mainstream in secure computing, operating systems, or embedded/IoT platforms, the languages that embrace the architecture early may capture mindshare.
I’m curious:
• Has anyone explored Nim on CHERI-RISC-V or Morello? • Are there discussions about capability-aware memory models in Nim? • Would it be feasible to experiment with a CHERI backend or runtime support?
Even a small experimental project could position Nim as an early participant in the capability-hardware ecosystem.
Would love to hear thoughts from people more familiar with the Nim compiler internals.
In short: no. Nobody will switch programming languages to one that works "better with CHERI" as CHERI itself is just a hack to make C safer.
Spatial and temporal memory safety can be done and should be done in the programming language. Rust does it well, Nim needs a little more refinements with its variation of borrow checking, but we're getting there.
CHERI itself is also totally against RISC's spirit IMO. Not that I consider RISC to have any merit, it's a very bad idea (especially in 2026 where you don't know what to do with all these transistors) with good implementations.