[Discussion] Nim Programming language - thoughts?
nim-lang.org
Anyone have experience using Nim? The TLDR that I am seeing is compiled portable python/js replacement in a way.
I was thinking about trying to write a webserver with it and was wondering if anyone had any previous experience with it.
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I have to disagree with your "when use what" list. Python has production ready web backend frameworks, Rust is perfectly fine for complex and high-level software, and PHP is mostly obsolete. That's my humble opinion though. I looked into Nim and like many of the concepts. It's quite complex and I prefer Rust most of the time when Nim would be an option. I'd argue it's some kind of "jack of all trades". A bit like python but compiled, ref-counted, and probably a lot faster. It's lacking the huge community python has though.
And where did Rust, Python etc get their huge community from in the first place? From being jack of all trades? No, because they were the best fit for their use case. After they established themselves there, they became widely good.
tl;dr Language evolution and future outlook are big factors besides the existing language features themselves.
I guess Rust has attracted many C++ devs because C++ is painful and there were no other/better options. Rust comes with a build/dependency management system and memory safety guarantees on top of the type safety. Even though C++ templates are still unmatched, I prefer Rust 95% of the time. C++ is evolving very slow and it's extremely hard to participate. Rust will win that race eventually.
Python has been around since 1991(!) and it took a looong time to build the community. It was a niche like Nim is now for many years.
I'll definitely keep an eye on Nim because it has the potential to become quite popular.
Again, that's all just my opinion.