What's limiting the growth of Nim in my opinion isn't the ecosystem; I believe the ecosystem grows with the adoption (and not the other way around).
On the other hand, successful languages usually have 2 things that Nim is currently lacking :
I'm not saying it is easy though, especially for open source projects.
I haven't followed the rise of Go closely enough to provide a relevant asnwer.
But for Rust the first killer app was Firefox. I'd argue that second one was Dropbox.
You don't really have to test, it is possible to make commercial or IT applications in-house.
I still have the impression of a discussion in a vacuum.
In _know @JPLRouge i've already written non trivial applications in nim, this is the reason i have this opinion of a missing mature/battletested library ecosystem, for example:
there is no _really good lua binding (for c++ there is the excellent sol3), there is no _really good entity component system (for c++ there is the excellent entt), there might be a binding to imgui but i despite that there are bindings for its table or docking fork. Is there an up to date sfml binding? Or an binding for the sfml-tgui gui library? A usable yaml library (i know there was one, but last time i checked it was broken)? A library for polygon partition and triangulation (c++ polypartition)? A good debugger (vscode c++ debugging is decent)? Task concurrency library (c++ transwarp)? Robust reliable udp networking (c ENet)?
I know a lot of the stuff i mentioned was wrapped or written already, but i bet, if we would have tried to build that game in nim, we would have to patch or fix most of the libraries or write them ourself.
I also know, producing good libraries and keeping them up to date is a tough job but in my opinion this is crucial to nims success.
I would love to see nim thrive because i think it is the most beautiful programming language out there :)
man, you are such a child, you probably and extra reason why Nim doesn't get popular, people with your behavior. enjoy your bubble.
@allochi, please stop your ad hominem attacks. We accept differing opinions, we accept technical disagreements, we don't accept attacking fellow users, whether they agree with you or not.
Furthermore there are less 18 year old developing in Nim that made and are still doing excellent contributions to the ecosystem. You might think it's a mild name calling, there are other cultures in the forum that might not perceive so.
Be respectful, consider yourself warned.
@mratsim my apology to you and the other users, never was my intention, all what I wanted to do is express my observations and provide feedback to a language that I'm passionate about, I don't need to explain what happened here, everyone can read the posts, but what I have been called implicitly is much worse than what I expressed explicitly, if you want to be fair and send warnings.
I have no further interest to discuss the subject anymore, and I thank Nim team and the users who supported my feedback or disagreed with it in a constructive way.
-"never my intention"? - You did repeated attacks and you got clear hints. So your "never my intention" statement is very questionable.
@mratsim
Thank you
No worries!
Oh, cool! I just came back from CERN last Monday after being there (living in Bonn, Germany normally) for a month. Currently stuck in quarantine, because Geneva is now considered a "covid risk zone" here in Germany and I'm waiting for my covid test result... Sure, next time I'm there I can get in contact and maybe we meet up! Maybe send me a pm with a mail address on discord / gitter (same name as here).
Could we add a forum category called "bikeshedding about syntax" so the rest of us can skip over it? To address the OP, it's amazing how much navel gazing goes on in programming communities. The meta discussions about language popularity aren't that much different than how middle school kids obsessively talk about social popularity.
My suggestion is to build things and let the rest fall into place. It is not uncommon for individuals with a strong vision and a sharp set of tools to outdo enormous competitors. My favorite quote from @Araq is this: "Understand that not having Google's or Mozilla's resources behind a project can be a strength - creativity is often the result of constraints."
For the record, I love the new GC.
I hope the mentioned fix for ARC in arraymancer is merged soon because I want to start using that too.