Hey, Araq and team,
Have you had a look at what Thomas Mertes has done with his Seed7 language?
Lots of similarities with nim.
Looks to have Pascal influences, similar types definition.
Compiles to C, and also has a fast interpreter. No curly braces, uses 'end' to terminate blocks, also colon terminates statements.
No type inference, but he seems very traditional about avoiding bugs by specifying and initialising every var/type. Lots of modern constructs, dictionaries/hash, sets, generics, object-orientation etc.
He seems to do memory management but without traditional garbage collection, not sure how.
I'm not pointing this out because I think it's competition for nim. But because I think nim will become very popular due to it's unique niche and expressiveness and portability, I imagine it could be worth swapping notes with someone like Thomas. He has done meticulous work on platform portability and his interpreter makes development without compilation ultra quick.
Just thought I'd point this out in case you haven't heard of him, his language is pretty obscure and he keeps putting new releases out, he may just be grateful to share notes or ideas.. who knows?
Nice critique... Yes syntax is verbose and the other features would need to be good to make it worthwhile. From what you say it appears not to be self-hosting, which is the real eat-your-own-dogfood benchmark for today's new languages.
I do like playing with new languages though..
In the last couple years I have downloaded and evaluated or played with: Nim (of course), Python, Pypy, Julia, D, FreePascal, Seed7, FreeBasic, C (gcc/mingw), TinyC etc
Never been tempted to download and evaluate: C++, Java....
Is this a thread for mentioning obscure languages we're playing around with?
If so, I'd like to mention Vlang.io. It's not even released yet (except online playground), but I do like the promised features and syntax, as a refuge from the growing complexity of Nim. I'd call it "Go done right", or "Go for people who hate Google". 🤓
Because I'm looking for a cross-platform[Windows +Linux, etc], fast, relatively easy language that compiles to C or C++, and which can interop or imbed with code +libs from C or C++.
I'm curious to see some evidence that FreeBASIC is "fast".
(Although transpiled languages do have the advantage of choosing the best optimizing C/C++ compiler, which on some platforms can be gcc, clang, icc, or some proprietary mainframe compiler.)
I never see FreeBASIC included in any modern benchmarks, which might just mean it's more obscure than Nim.
In that aspect nim is unique. Crystal comes the closest, but it only works for linux.
I think Dlang comes closer to that criteria than Crystal, but that might be a matter of syntax preference. Dlang also has a nice portable UI library.
But I still prefer and recommend Nim.
Kostya's benchmarks is finally back to life, and they just added Vlang. I don't know the details, but the current results are hilarious! 😁
While we're on the subject of joking about other languages, much D lols on Reddit.
(Sorry, couldn't resist. This thread will probably get locked as well.)
Admin note: I removed an offtopic post.
Kinda arbitrary. This topic bounced between several different languages and how they compare to Nim. Vlang was mentioned on this thread before without getting censored, but my mention of it just appearing on TechEmpower was censored.
Inconsistent use of power is bad politics...
Well moreso than your post, you were censored. ;-)
I don't remember you contributing anything to the Nim ecosystem, and your posts are usually controversial and trolling. I've censored you before and I've been PM'ed multiple times on IRC about you. Nim users notify me about spam on the forum. And about your posts.
Inconsistent use of power is bad politics...
Indeed, sorry about that. I fixed it. The consistent action was to ban you.