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Comment by archargelod | Hacker News Reader

Check out Nim[0] - it's strongly typed, with good type inference, clean elegant syntax, memory management is automatic (optional gc, default is ARC + small footprint cycle collector), compiles to small single binaries (Hello World is less than 100 kb), has powerful metaprogramming and lsp support.

Nim compiles to C/C++ and then to native code, so performance is on the same level as Rust/C/C++. You can also compile Nim to js/wasm and run the same code in the web.

[0] - https://nim-lang.org

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nim unfortunately took python's significant-indentation idea though

For what it's worth, Nim allows much more lexical flexibility than Python. You can very often use parens ()s and optional extra parens are not usually a problem either - the bracket is just not spelled {}. As another example, both code & documentation comments have "open-close" forms with #[ and ##[. Also, my hello world's are more like 16K on x64-Linux than 100K. There are also user-defined operators, lisp-like syntax macros but with static typing, etc., etc. Nim is Choice, but not everyone likes that.

Roc, Nim and Idris are currently compelling to me.

Roc and Idris mainly because I like pure functional languages along with some typing. But I like Nim a lot too.

I am on the lookout for a language that I can replace some overly complex Bash scripts with for commandline use.

https://github.com/c-blake/cligen makes whipping up CLI utilities very easy in Nim with a pretty fancy CL-user experience (colorized, user-tunable --help, Zsh/bash completions, brief long options, spellcheck/autosuggest on typos, etc.). As examples, there are like 60+ such utilities over at https://github.com/c-blake/bu . Unsure all that adds up to "critical mass" for you, but it seemed worth noting.

That is definitely worth noting!!

I don’t suppose I could compile a binary that runs on both linux and macos (a la Cosmopolitan)?

I do not have any personal experience with it, but I have heard several success stories for Actually Portable Executables & Nim and there is this to try to ease the path for cosmopolitan libc fans: https://github.com/foxoman/cosmonim/blob/master/README.md

One of the best parts. Only it's getting worse with colon-itis.

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