I've got to say, I'm totally impressed with Nim. Every day I use it I learn something more about it and its inherent power. What impresses me even more is how far Nim has gotten with such a small community. It isn't like Perl 6, with the millions of Perl developers who could have worked on it. It isn't like Rust, with the million and millions and millions of dollars that Mozilla get from Google and now Yahoo. Nim is small and nimble and practical. Nim is useful to me because I can use it now, unlike Perl 6. When Araq says Nim 1.0 will be out "within the next 3 months" [1] I know I can trust this to probably happen, unlike Rust. Just like Perl 6, Rust keeps on not getting 1.0 out the door. But I think by April I will be using Nim 1.0 and I'll be loving it! Keep up the fantastic work Araq and everyone else who contributes to Nim. We all appreciate everything you're doing!
Seconded. Nim is the kind of language that makes me want to seek out projects just so I can use the language. Keep up the good work and pay no attention to the naysayers at the moment.
Many well intention people will say 'oh you absolutely need X before 1.0'. That's a trap. The only thing essential is a stable and solid core language implementation. All the other shortcomings (docs, stdlib) can be overcome in due course. Essentially 1.0 is a stake in the ground saying at least this part of the language spec is stable. I'd rather see better designed stdlib modules later than rushed implementations sooner.
Just FYI, Rust 1.0.0-alpha is imminent (today or maybe tomorrow) and only a few more alpha/beta releases are planned in its six week release cycle before getting 1.0.0. Perl 6 is also on its way to a production-ready state[1], so-called version 6.0.0. 2015 will be an exciting year for those three languages equally!
[1]: https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/get_ready_to_party/
Rust imitates decades-old c syntax with its mustache braces. I'd use nim for its indentation format by itself.
I tried Rust and got:
The procedure entry point AcquireSRWLockExclusive could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll
So I wasn't impressed.
mapdog said: AcquireSRWLockExclusive could not be located
To be fair, this is not the fault of rust. rust supports only Win7+ . And AcquireSRWLockExclusive was first introduced with Win7 (even MS did write Vista in the docu...)
But rust can not be used by someone whose customers use Windows XP.
jibal
he's just kidding, nobody here really wants to put Rust down (I think :-) )
jibal, I'm not "trumping up" Nim. Nim is just plain great, regardless of whether or not I point it out!
And I'm not "demonizing" Rust. There's no 1.0 release out yet, and they've been delaying it for a long time now. First they said it would be out before the end up 2014, but that didn't happen, obviously! Now they're saying March or whatever, but if their track record is any indication, it might not happen. Even then have you been following what they're doing? Yeah, the language may be locked in but the libraries will apparently still be changing even after 1.0! What good is that? The whole point of a 1.0 release is to get a stable version out there. That means it doesn't keep undergoing massive change! C'mon Rust, get your act together!
Are you really telling us that Perl 6 shouldn't be shamed? They've been working on it for like 15 years now, and there still isn't a good Perl 6 implementation! How is that anything but shameful? In that same period of time Nim has gone from nothing to becoming one of the greatest programming languages of our generation. Perl 6 is just plain sad!
Yeah, I'm really impressed by Nim. It's a great language with a great community and I'm not afraid to say so! If you don't like that, too frigging bad! I'm proud of Nim, I'm proud to be a Nim user, and I'm proud to admit both of those things!