Comment by carterza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carterza | Hacker News Reader

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I've written quite a few personal projects in Nim, and I love programming in it. Nim is garbage-collected and the GC is not a stop the world GC, so the language is well-suited for game-development.

Its standard library is improving with each release, and is already equivalent to what you expect from most modern programming languages. It contains flaws and inconsistencies, but it is being worked on and stabilized for a 1.0 release of the language. The ecosystem is small - but growing.

Some of the great things about Nim -

1) Ability to interface with C/C++/Obj-C/JS

2) Can compile to any of ^

3) Meta-programming

4) Python like syntax

5) Small binaries

6) Can compile to WASM via emscripten

I've built AWS lambda jobs with Nim by interfacing with Python, as prototypes for work, but I've never been able to leverage the language in production. I really only use it professionally to replace personal shell scripts or other tasks I've previously automated.

That said - Nim has a bright future - it needs to mature and hit 1.0 and it could really use some more interest as well as sponsorship.

Github - https://github.com/zacharycarter

5) Small binaries

That part is amazing. I personally do not have a real use case to exploit it [1], just find it neat from an engineering viewpoint...

I guess, it has an aggressive dead code removal process, compared to other - nowadays hot - compiled languages (Go, Haskell, Rust, D, Crystal). In those languages if you use a small part of their standard library, you usually get large chunks of it linked in statically (+ runtime if there is such)...

(Once I've tried LTO with one of my Rust project: it increased the build time tremendously but in the end it managed to shave off only 30KB from my several MB binary...)

[1] If I would try micro controller programming ever, I probably would give Nim a shot because of this...

I've just tried now some Rosetta code examples. Most of it had to be modified a bit to get compiled with this Nim version although. (adding types, change case of type names)

Used -d:release --opt:size, then strip, Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit. The binary sizes:

GTK2 example code: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/GUI_enabling/disabling_of_contro... - 35k

http client: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Ordered_words#Nim - 72k

http server: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Web_server#Nim - 121k

The binaries are dynamically linked only to the common standard C prog. dependencies on Linux: linux-vdso.so.1, libc.so.6, ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (Except for the gtk2 example of course, which uses libdl to to pull in a large bunch of additional gtk dependencies too...)

how does it compile to wasm if it has a GC?

Probably it builds the GC into the WebAssembly output.

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