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Comment by jonpalmisc | Hacker News Reader

I’m always hesitant to start projects in less popular languages without knowing if they will stick around, etc. I don’t know much about Nim, but I have tons of respect for people who create excellent content like this that helps a language become more popular and mainstream by making it more accessible.

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The Venn diagram of:

1. strong financial backing, with open governance and broad contributors, and

2. cool

... has only a thin sliver of overlap.

At some point, either you're motivated to tinker and explore, or you aren't. I can't say what the future holds for Nim, but I would wager that it's an order of magnitude more likely to be around in 20 years than any personal side project app that one of us writes.

Nim is 14 years old

But still pretty much one-man work.

I admit, it’s a true work of love.

However, its bus factor is 1. I would love to see some effort to make sure it has a future beyond that.

Humans are volatile.

(What’s up with projects maintained by the late Jörg Schilling?)

there is one designer, but the same thing is true for Ruby, Python and many other programming languages

yeah, definitely not the only one pushing the design as well - dominick has had a pretty big impact I think right? He's at least helped me.

A lot of previous contributors to Nim are currently working on an experimental fork due to disagreements with the development of the official compiler: https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull

Was totally unaware of this. The Readme:

> For now it's closer to an alternative with most deviations appearing in the standard library, mostly in the form of deleting much of it.

Yikes. I've found that languages with a small standard library have deep dependency trees for imported packages. I hope this is a stepping stone to a different standard library, rather than an end goal in-and-of itself.

Actually the phrasing in the readme is not correct - I will change it later, but now I want to say that the objective is not deleting "much" of it, but rather cleaning up old and deprecated modules, or providing alternative solutions (for things like os/json that historically were a point of friction).

> A lot of previous contributors

Not really. The fork looks pretty dormant.

I think better phrasing would indeed be something like "several former core developers" - of course we can't really measure up to the size of the original community, and don't yet have any paid developers (like Araq and narimiran [1] in the mainline - although since the end of September there were not a lot of activity on their part as well - [2] ~30 commits (~23 that are marked `[backport]`) and even less [3] for narimiran)

[1] https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/8540#55418

[2] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/commits/devel?author=Araq

[3] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/commits/devel?author=narimir...

Right now, it seems like most of the work on the mainline seems to be done by community members.

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