Hacker News Reader

Comment by progman | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I have written a lot of Lisp and Scheme code, and now I am very content with Nim. I also tried Rust and Haskell but those languages are too cluttering for me. Nim is compact, well readable, powerful and performant.

Nim developed from the bottom up, being closely related to C which is nice and makes porting to other platforms easy. The Nim development team adds only features which really make sense. If they just remove those immature ugly features like strong spaces and the redundancy of underscores then Nim 2.0 could be a really great language.

View on HN

OTOH, as a schemer, I much prefer Haskell and Rust to Nim, both theoretically and in practice. What syntax and abstractions you like are down to how you think, and Lisp programmers are programmers like any other, not incarnations of the spirit of smugness, as many people paint us.

> What syntax and abstractions you like are down to how you think

Obviously this is not only my problem because there are only sparely applications written in Haskell. It is possible to write real world applications in Haskell, as proven by Leksah and the window manager xmonad. However, would you write an MS Office clone in Haskell? I wouldn't. I am still honestly interested in Haskell but I cannot understand why the cabal hell has not been fixed yet. Sandboxes and VMs are no option for me. Rust, Nim, and many other languages don't have this problem which points out that the cabal hell is due to Haskell's nature.

Rust is another story. It is way more practical than Haskell, and I would use it for safety and systems programming. Nim however has become my favorite after a long journey of languages because I am really productive with it. Only Lisp has a similar productivity, and sometimes I still use it. Nim has the advantage of being very close to C which makes porting to other platforms extremely easy -- and hence also all my Nim code.

True enough about Haskell. As for Rust, as awkward as it can be at times, it feels more pleasant than Nim to me much of the time.

Rust is an awesome language. It has the power to replace C++ and Java as industry standard.

However, there are three points which annoy me. First, the Rust compiler is huge (LLVM based). Second, it requires a native Rust compiler for bootstrap. Third, it doesn't compile to C which makes porting to other platforms difficult. Nim doesn't have these problems. It is small, self-hosting, and easily portable.

That's true, but Rust and its compiler components are fairly well ported, LLVM's going to be near the top of the porting list for any new architecture, and processors are almost a monoculture at this point.

> Third, it doesn't compile to C which makes porting to other platforms difficult.

Not compiling to C is a feature. It insulates us from the undefined behavior of C (signed overflow never results in UB in Rust, for example) and allows us to actually get proper debug info.

Compiling to C vs using LLVM is a complex design tradeoff. For example, the Posix standard specifies a C interface. Quote: "The stat structure shall contain at least the following members..." This means you can wrap 'struct stat' in Nim once and be done with it (since the mapping to C is by generating C code) whereas for eg Rust you need to wrap it once for every different OS (and potentially even for every OS version+CPU combination), since the offsets and sizes can differ. So yes, porting to other platforms really is easier when you have a C code generator.

Wouldn't you just use libc directly from Rust if you wanted that?

(I agree that it's a tradeoff generally, I'm just not sure this example is particularly motivating.)

> Wouldn't you just use libc directly from Rust if you wanted that?

No, because the interface is

    int stat(const char *path, struct stat *buf);

https://docs.rs/libc/0.2.16/libc/fn.stat.html

(Which is how stuff like https://docs.rs/libc/0.2.16/libc/fn.stat.html is built)

It would be physically impossible for a call to that function to work with a single definition of the struct stat, because the set of fields (and their ordering) and struct size differ between platforms. So that libc wrapper must provide separate definitions of the struct for each platform.

Ah, sorry! I was thinking about things like "the size of this type is different per-platform," not "every single platform has a different definition of this struct."

I still think that, given Cargo, the one-time cost makes it worth it, but after seeing my error, think that the point makes more sense. Thank you for being patient. :)

There are other ways to address this issue. You can do what Swift does and call into libclang so that you can pull out the structure definitions, for instance.

Furthermore, if your frontend doesn't know about structure layout then you forgo some important systems language features. For example, you can't implement sizeof as a compile time constant.

> There are other ways to address this issue. You can do what Swift does and call into libclang so that you can pull out the structure definitions, for instance.

Sure and you only need to call libclang for each different platform. Or is it on every platform? ;-)

> If they just remove those immature ugly features like strong spaces

Strong spaces are already gone.

That's good news, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com