Hacker News Reader

Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

Nim isn't a new language, it's been around a while.

There's something about not hitting 1.0. It instills doubt on adoption that things will change in a breaking way soon, and that you're going to need to rewrite your stuff in potentially non-trivial way.

I liked playing with Nim in spare time. But, I don't think I'll use it for anything I care about to maintain for a long time.

Every language has faced challenges with change, nothing specific to Nim. And 1.0 is a distraction, if the language version has all the features you want, you can use it as long as you want. The code is also open and an unbearable bug can be easily backported.

If you do want the new cooler features, then ya, you may need to port your code but that's the case with any compiler update - you need to run a full regression at the very least.

1.0 _may be_ a distraction but I think it's a fair one. It's a common enough convention that pre-1.0 versions are the developer's way of saying, "please please please don't treat this as ready and production quality. We're still figuring some things out and haven't settled on some key choices."

If that's not what the developers are trying to communicate with a pre-1.0 version I do wonder what they're gating 1.0 on. What needs finalization? Documentation?

Given "the compiler is in development and some important features are still missing" (quote from the FAQ) it would surely qualify as new.

It was first posted to HN in 2013.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6820474

Reply on news.ycombinator.com