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Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

The reason is tooling. The Clion plugin doesn't even do type checking and is a year out of date. The language server has been in progress for five years and is still not done. The VSCode plugin is okay, but refactoring, auto-imports, and autocomplete are nowhere near as easy as other languages like Java in jetbrains products. Not to mention a good debugger.

I hope Jetbrains can prioritize the Clion plugin. It would help a lot.

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Due to the abstraction that Nim offers, things like autocomplete and refactoring are not needed as much as in Java.

If I start typing newSeq, give me the option to auto import from std, etc. These little things add up.

Also basic usage of generics doesn't really work w/ the vs code plugin, which is the best one.

> If I start typing newSeq, give me the option to auto import from std, etc.

Good idea! I've made a proof-of-concept Neovim plugin: https://sr.ht/~xigoi/nvim-summon/

It wasn't difficult, so if you use a different editor, you can make one too (feel free to reuse my documentation scraper).

Neat! But I pay for Clion, so I'm hoping they can prioritize this so I don't have to write plugins myself... :)

We'll see when I start my next nim project, how I can contribute..

I am considering betting my next big project on Nim. If it works out and I can work on it full time then I'll have lots of time to help Nim!

Note - looks like generics do work, the issue was my file names had dashes in them. Evidently that is not supported, but I didn't get any errors :p

Without disagreeing on the specific points about the tooling, I’m not convinced. Golang took off with a far weaker tooling story. Maybe the table stakes have changed in a decade - but I believe other factors are more important. Moreover I remain skeptical that even if those tooling issues were fixed tomorrow it would help Nim turn the corner.

Maybe! It would get me on board, though :) I'm working on a new server side project and am using Java for now, because of this reason. I hope someday I have time to help build IDE plugins and so on :)

> Golang took off with a far weaker tooling story

All Go had to do was say, “Built by Google” and people came running.

Well, the "designed by UNIX co-creator" piece helped too I'm sure.

Dart was built by Google, and nobody wants to touch it. Well, a few diehard fans.

Go is a nice language that gets a lot right. Saying people only use it because of Google is kinda shortsighted.

Because Chrome kind of sabotaged the project by dropping Dartium, while Angular team decided to sponsor Typescript and moved away from Dart.

The language was saved from dying by AdWords, which had just migrated from GWT into AngularDart.

Key designers from Dart 1.0 eventually left Google, like Gilad and Lund.

Flutter gave it a new life, but also is the only reason to use Dart, Flutter apps.

> Golang took off with a far weaker tooling story

Corporate marketing budget and related astroturfing.

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