Appreciate you all answering some questions :)
https://nim-lang.org/blog/2017/06/23/community-survey-2017.html
Cheers,
Dominik
One for the questions threw me for a loop: "What direction do you think Nim should head in as far as GC?" (paraphrased)
I'll tell you right now that I would stop using Nim if it didn't have garbage collection. Nim has the following combination of features that draw me to it:
Personally, I think things like the borrow checker in Rust are a huge pain in the ass. Manual memory management isn't all that difficult, but it's time consuming and rarely necessary. Maybe it's my relative lack of experience with Nim, but I rarely even have to think about what the GC is doing. It never really gets in my way for my use case. However, my use case is usually something like back-end web development where GC internals or implementation doesn't really factor all that much into it. That said, I would love to hear from others who are working on less abstracted concepts who have had trouble with the GC.
The reason I love Nim: It feels like I'm writing Python, but it runs like I'm writing C.
I'll tell you right now that I would stop using Nim if it didn't have garbage collection.
I don't think it's an either or. Nim will always have some kind of GC. I interpreted the question more as "how important is no-GC programming in Nim to you". Think of competing with languages like C++ and D that allow an all-RAII solution to some problems. D in particular, since D has a GC, and the community is now addressing ways to deal with the challenges of applications that must NOT invoke it or even include in a runtime.
The reason I love Nim: It feels like I'm writing Python, but it runs like I'm writing C.
This.
Excited to see the survey results, thanks @dom96!