Nim 1.4

Nim 1.4(nim-lang.org)

278 points by narimiran 5 years ago | 140 comments

nivviv 5 years ago |

A small perspective insight from a game developer:

We (Beamdog) are using nim in production for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, for the serverside parts of running the multiplayer infra.

nim is uniquely good in providing an immense amount of value for very little effort. It gets _out of my way_ and makes it very easy to write a lot of code that mostly works really well, without having given me any serious traps and pits to fall into. No memleaks, no spurious crashes, no side-effect oopses, anything like that. It's C/++ interop has been a huge enabler for feature growth as well, as we can partly link in game code and it works fine. For example, our platform integrates seamlessly with native/openssl/dtls for game console connectivity. And it all works, and does so with good performance. It is all now a set of quite a few moving components (a message bus, various network terminators, TURN relays, state management, logging and metrics, a simple json api consumed both by game clients and web (https://nwn.beamdog.net), ...).

We're still lagging behind and are on 1.0.8, but that is totally fine. It's tested and works, and there's no real incentive to move to 1.2 or 1.4 - yet!

Usage for our game has expanded to provide a few open source supporting utilities (https://github.com/Beamdog/nwsync) and libraries (https://github.com/niv/neverwinter.nim/) too. The good part about those is that they are cross-platform as well, and we can provide one-click binaries for users.

OTOH, There's been a few rough edges and some issues along the way. Some platform snafus come to mind, but those have been early days - 0.17, etc. Some strange async bugs had been found and fixed quickly though.

Good and bad, at least for me, nim has been a real joy to work with. If I had the chance to message my 3-years-younger, I'd just say "yea, keep going with that plan", as it turned out to save us a lot of development time. I suspect the features we've put in wouldn't have been possible in the timeframe we had, if it would have been all written in, say, C++.

Abishek_Muthian 5 years ago | |

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

May I ask, did you consider Go and decided against it for any reason considering your requirements of quick development, cross-platform, interoperability are all guaranteed features of Go which should have given better peace of mind considering a production application?

cb321 5 years ago | | |

Go code runs much more slowly than Nim code in my experience. Nim realizes better ergonomics than Python in some ways (UFCS, command syntax, user-defined operators) and as good performance & lightweightness as C/Rust.

I'm honestly surprised Nim is not the secret weapon of many start-ups. Nim is much more "open architecture" instead of pushing some "single, canned turn-key fits most users" solutions.

Having a juggernaut like Google marketing/pushing/subsidizing something might provide false as well as true peaces of mind. :-) { Such peace is a multi-dimensional concept. :-) }

nivviv 5 years ago | | |

Go was a consideration and there are a few libraries internally existed for Go at that point, but nim in the end won out on acceptance and it convinced - despite the known risks of using a only semi-mature language - on feasibility in getting it done in time for the initial game release.

The PoC was incredibly quick to manifest, and iterating on it had quickly proven itself as a good way forward.

Peace of mind was a judgment call. Despite being a rather sizeable project now, what we had back then was already very stable and reliable (even under heavy benchmark load) and there weren't any great unknowns souring making the call.

tylorr 5 years ago | |

What's the dev experience been like? Do you feel like there is good editor support for debugging and such?

nivviv 5 years ago | | |

I've been using vscode+nim. Debugging was mostly just writing correct code in the first place! ;) The only gripe I have is sometimes nimsuggest hanging itself at 100% cpu use, and I have to kill it manually.

Even with the rather oldschool approach of echo/logging.nim usage, things tend to turn around quickly. I have not felt the need to be able to attach a debugger to the process, mostly because our architecture is very pluggable. Almost all events/interactions are on a message bus and can be hooked/handled individually.

nepeckman 5 years ago |

Since Nim has hit the front page twice in the past day, let me just say: if you're at all curious about the language, try it out over the weekend. Nim isnt quite as simple as Zig (to compare to another compiled language with a smaller ecosystem), but the more advanced features stay out of the way until you need them. If you've worked with any static language, you probably know 80%-90% of what you need to write productive Nim code. The dev team has worked hard over the past year to improve documentation, and the website links to some great tutorials.

neverartful 5 years ago | |

"Nim isn't quite as simple as Zig"

My experience is complete opposite. I find Nim to be very simple and Zig to be not simple. What's the problem with Zig? I find the documentation to be chaotic. I believe that this is largely due to the rapid pace of changes (including changes that break earlier code).

elcritch 5 years ago | | |

That makes sense. I haven't tried Zig, but it's still pretty early in its history. That means a lot of syntax change, similar to Rust which is settling down, or Swift. Nim's been around long enough that it's settled it's syntax a while back.

Before I started really digging into Nim, it seemed like it was always changing the language a lot (feature churn). However, most of those changes have been compiler support for different GC's and other backend languages, which don't generally break existing code. I've tried Nim code from 4 years ago, and its almost the exact same syntax. Sometimes stdlib names changed. I think syntax change is the part that gets people a lot in terms of daily "complexity".

It actually reminds me of the feel of Python 2, before Python 3 that seems to add new syntax & language complexity every release. Well Python 2 but with a more solid language theory (e.g. everything can be a statement, etc). The trickiest part of day to day Nim are: var vs no-var, object vs ref object, and some iterator annoyances.

ziml77 5 years ago | |

Maybe I'll give it another try. I might have gone too deep into the docs, but Nim seemed to get very complicated with all the {.annotation.} to remember

nepeckman 5 years ago | | |

If you're just starting with the language, my recommendation would be to ignore the pragmas. None of them are necessary for basic functionality, and a lot of them are only useful for very specific optimizations. The most useful pragmas in my experience are the pragmas for FFI, async, and memory/side effect tracking.

jibal 5 years ago | |

Nim and Zig have vastly different philosophies and targets.

dom96 5 years ago |

I'm going to do a little bit of a shameless plug as a way to show off just what Nim is capable of. If you've ever played one of the many IO games, it might seem familiar to you. Basically I have used Nim to create a multiplayer game that can be played in the browser[1].

I'm planning to write up a more detailed post outlining the architecture of this. But suffice it to say, Stardust is written 100% in Nim. Both the servers and the client running in your browser is written in Nim. The client uses Nim's JS backend and the server Nim's C backend. The two share code to ensure the game simulation is the same across both. Communication happens over websockets.

It's been a lot of fun working on this and I cannot imagine another language being as flexible as Nim to make something like this possible. I already have an Android client up and running too, it also is built from the same code and I plan to release it soon.

1 - https://stardust.dev/play

zacmps 5 years ago | |

Not to disparage Nim, but I can think of a number of other languages where this is possible:

* JS, obviously

* Rust

* C/C++

* Anything else that can compile to WASM

dom96 5 years ago | | |

Fair enough. I think then we get into how easy this is to do in these. For example, can you really target the web browser vs node from the same JS codebase by simply changing the compiler invokation?

krat0sprakhar 5 years ago | |

This looks really amazing! Would love to read an architecture post for this. Adding this in your book would also be pretty cool

mixmastamyk 5 years ago | |

> Android client up and running too, it also is built from the same code

How does that work, and is it an alternative to dart/flutter?

dom96 5 years ago | | |

I wouldn't say so. Since my game mostly just needs a canvas I make use of SDL2 to target Android (and plan to use it for iOS/desktop as well). I created a thin library which targets either HTML5 canvas (JS) or SDL2 (everything else): https://github.com/dom96/gamelight

DannyB2 5 years ago |

An economic argument for GC instead of ARC/ORC.

Commercial web application in Java. Java GC is concurrent, on other cpu cores than the cores processing customer requests. Modern GCs such as Red Hat's Shenandoah or Oracle's ZGC have 1 ms or lower pause times on heap sizes of terabytes (TB). Java 15 increased max heap size from 4 TB to 16 TB of memory.

Now the argument. A thread running on a cpu core which processes an incoming request has to earn enough to pay the economic dollar cost of the other threads that do GC on other cpu cores. But that thread processing the client request spends ZERO cpu cycles on memory management. No reference counting. Malloc is extremely fast as long as memory is available. (GC on other cores ensures this.) During or even after that thread has serviced a client request, GC will (later) "dispose" of the garbage that was allocated when servicing the client request.

Obviously, just from Java continuously occupying the top 2 or 3 spots for popularity over the last 15 years -- Java's approach must be doing something right.

That said, I find Nim very interesting, and this is not a rant about Nim. I am skeptical of an alternative to real GC until it is proven to work, in a heavily multi threaded environment. And there is that economic argument of servicing client requests with no cpu cycles spent on memory management -- until AFTER the client request was fully serviced.

Boxxed 5 years ago |

There are a lot of gotchas with the new GC that make me nervous about this release:

> As far as we know, ARC works with the complete standard library except for the current implementation of async...

That's not a great endorsement...

> If your code uses cyclic data structures, or if you’re not sure if your code produces cycles, you need to use --gc:orc and not --gc:arc.

Seems like this is a big onus to put on the user -- it's tough to prove a negative like this.

euan_torano 5 years ago |

Awesome to see 1.4 finally released, and to have a version that should hopefully build cleanly out of the box on OpenBSD and FreeBSD and mostly "just work"[1]. Next target is NetBSD[2] then DragonFly!

1. https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/14035 2. https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/6610

xyproto 5 years ago |

I was skeptical towards Nim. Then I wrote a small program that uses SDL2, and compared it to the same program written in over 10 other programming languages. Nim has an excellent combination of ease of use and performance.

sergiotapia 5 years ago | |

Nim is my mistress. I work with Elixir and Javascript, but something about Nim is so pure and exact and precise. I love it.

I'm hoping someone builds a great web framework with it, and a library like Ecto for better postgresql access. This language great potential to build faster software.

speps 5 years ago | |

Can you output WebAssembly/Emscripten project that uses SDL2?

nikki93 5 years ago | | |

This seems quite possible from everything I've explored, and also is something I want to try soon. It's also interesting to use Nim through JS for a scripting layer for an application written in Nim; where they both communicate through shared data structures or something.

Here's a repo I found: https://github.com/Jipok/Nim-SDL2-and-Emscripten

treeform 5 years ago | | |

Yes. People have done this.

PMunch 5 years ago |

Great to see that Nim grows ever faster and more stable. Been a fan of the language for quite a while now and while I miss the old days of new and exiting changes with every release it's much easier to target Nim now that it has become this stable. Great work all around!

untog 5 years ago |

I played around with Nim a little and was amazed at how small the executables were: 10s of KB for something simple. Even Rust spits out 100s of KB, or even >1MB by default.

In the end I still went with Rust, simply because it's more popular, but my initial impression was that Nim is a really fun language to work in, and much much easier to pick up than Rust.

anta40 5 years ago | |

"and much much easier to pick up than Rust."

That's my impression so far, too. Previously, I already had some experiences with C, Pascal, and Python. Then learning Nim just feels natural.

Not so much with Rust. Well of course it's not surprising, with memory safety as one of its goals.

nn3 5 years ago | | |

>Well of course it's not surprising, with memory safety as one of its goals.

Where is this idea coming from that memory safety has to be complicated? Nearly all languages (basically everything except C/C++/Assembler) people are using are memory safe. And usually it's not complicated at all.

untog 5 years ago | | |

Yes, I think for me Nim could be a great answer for when I want to throw together a quick script. Right now I'll often use JS/Node for that and I'm not going to switch to Rust because it'll take a lot longer to get a rough and ready script going.

cb321 5 years ago | | |

I have never seen anyone say that Rust was easier to pick up than Nim...(Famous last words, I know!)

Tiberium 5 years ago |

Great stuff! GC ORC is an amazing improvement over existing memory management models :) I hope to see more Nim projects adopt it!

MrBuddyCasino 5 years ago |

So one of the biggest improvements to my day-to-day life as a programmer was having compiler-checked nullability in Kotlin. It is the most significant feature that makes programs more reliable and code more readable compared to Java. I never want to miss it again.

Why did Nim decide to allow null pointers? They must have had a very good reason, given its young age?

cb321 5 years ago | |

Minor correction Re: "young age" - Nim dates back to 2006 with a first public release in 2008 and is older than Go and Go is older than Kotlin.

mratsim 5 years ago | |

You need null pointers for system programming.

That said you can already declare `type MyPtr = ptr int not nil` but the compiler is still clunky on proofs and needs a lot of help.

it is planned to have a much better prover in the future and ultimately Z3 integration for such safety features: https://nim-lang.org/docs/drnim.html

alehander42 5 years ago | |

nil checking is being worked on : it might be a part of 1.6

qmmmur 5 years ago | |

Interop I imagine.

sp33der89 5 years ago |

Congratulations! And thanks for all the progress on ARC/ORC. But I must say, even though I'm excited about ARC/ORC, I'm even more happy to see the nice list of bugfixes and quality standard library additions!!

icey 5 years ago |

Nim is a lot of fun to write, and the language is small enough that you could build something fun / useful in a weekend. The community is also very responsive. Definitely worth checking out!

tiffanyh 5 years ago |

Web development.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again ... I wish more folks would use NIM for web development.

moigagoo 5 years ago | |

100% agree. I'm developing an ORM [1] in my spare time specifically with the vision to make it easier to create web apps with Nim. Created a PoC with Jester in backend, Karax on the front, and Norm for model definition, and it turns out to be very much usable, accessing the same models from backend and frontend and all that.

[1] https://norm.nim.town

fataliss 5 years ago |

Maybe my lack of lower level language knowledge will show here, but how does that compare to Rust? I keep seeing and hearing about these new-ish languages Rust, Nim, Zig, etc. that all claim to be C/C++ perf lvl but better developper experience. Any of these is preferred for API/Web development? Does it yield much advantage over something like Elixir that already provides significant perf increase over a Python(Django-Flask)/RoR stack?

MrMan 5 years ago |

I am using nim this week on a data file scraping project. If you can Google and write python you can just start with nim and learn as you go, very easy.

I am super bummed that there is (effectively) no debugging. I am too lazy to mess with VS code to get gdb working, it should just work already. Someday, I guess. Maybe jetbrains will save us. With real IDE support nim would sweep the nations.

moigagoo 5 years ago | |

From my experience, there really is not that much need for debugging in the sense of adding breakpoints and attaching to a running process with Nim. Honestly, `debugEcho` suffices, give it a shot. I mean, you may need more debugging tools when your project gets large but since you're just starting with Nim, you can just relax and keep going.

MrMan 5 years ago | | |

Relax is my strategy right now but I am a bear of little brain and spent years with Matlab stopped in the debugger while I went to lunch. Peering into data at will is something I can't easily give up. Debug trace was how I spent the stressful young years of my programming life and for data intensive, rather than logic intensive transactional code, I don't prefer tracing.

yitchelle 5 years ago |

I am intrigued by Nim. Anyone know of the motivation for Nim? I was not able to find that out in their website.

pietroppeter 5 years ago | |

From this nice interview with Araq (language creator): http://157.245.209.254/andreas-rumpf-on-creating-and-growing...

> I started the Nim project after an unsuccessful search for a good systems programming language. Back then (2006) there were essentially two lines of systems programming languages:

> The C (C, C++, Objective C) family of languages.

> The Pascal (Pascal, Modula 2, Modula 3, Ada, Oberon) family of languages.

> The C-family of languages has quirky syntax, grossly unsafe semantics and slow compilers but is overall quite flexible to use. This is mostly thanks to its meta-programming features like the preprocessor and, in C++'s case, to templates.

> The Pascal family of languages has an unpleasant, overly verbose syntax but fast compilers. It also has stronger type systems and extensive runtime checks make it far safer to use. However, it lacks most of the metaprogramming capabilities that I wanted to see in a language.

> For some reason, neither family looked at Lisp to take inspiration from its macro system, which is a very nice fit for systems programming as a macro system pushes complexity from runtime to compile-time.

> And neither family looked much at the upcoming scripting languages like Python or Ruby which focussed on usability and making programmers more productive. Back then these attributes were ascribed to their usage of dynamic typing, but if you looked closely, most of their nice attributes were independent of dynamic typing.

> So that's why I had to create Nim; there was a hole in the programming language landscape for a systems programming language that took Ada's strong type system and safety aspects, Lisp's metaprogramming system so that the Nim programmer can operate on the level of abstraction that suits the problem domain and a language that uses Python's readable but concise syntax.

pietroppeter 5 years ago | | |

Also relevant this other interview (video), a bit more recent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9SGIB946lw

ejstembler 5 years ago |

Great! Where's the announcement on https://twitter.com/nim_lang so I can retweet it?

dom96 5 years ago | |

hehe, here you go https://twitter.com/nim_lang/status/1317192813042372609 :)

pshirshov 5 years ago |

> The reason is that only after the new(result, finalizer) call the compiler knows that it needs to generate a custom destructor for the CustomObject type, but when it compiled tricky the default destructor was used.

I'm wondering why people underestimate graphs that much. It's lot easier to explicitly represent dependencies between your definitions as a graph and not just avoid such issues but also get rid of unnecessary passes. I did that in my compiler and it works great.

thelazydogsback 5 years ago |

NIM and Red (also on HN today) seem both seem to have an interesting and intersecting feature set. Anybody here used or heavily evaluated both that can comment?

9214 5 years ago | |

Nim and Red are quite different languages, both in terms of semantics and in terms of project's goals and scope. Perhaps you should elaborate on an intersection that you see between the two.

I can speak only for Red: it takes its heritage in Lisp, Forth and Logo, has an embeded cross-platform GUI engine with a dedicated DSL for UI building, C-like sub-language for system level programming, OMeta-like PEG parser, and unique type system with literal forms for things like currencies, URLs, e-mail and dates with hashtags; all of that fitting in one-megabyte binary and valuing human-centered design above all.

cb321 5 years ago | |

Rebol/Red is more like Python/Cython - able to be fast but falling back to an interpreter for dynamic things. As such there are probably more "performance footguns" (though any such thing is ultimately subjective based on programmer awareness). Nim feels more like what C++ (or Python) should always have been. Not sure if this helps. It's kind of a "big" question.

9214 5 years ago | | |

No, it's actually the other way around: Red and Rebol are interpreted by default, and Red has a bootstrapping AOT compiler capable of bridging it with Red/System (a C-like sub-language), which it turn targets machine code. However, since Red is highly dynamic, compiler cannot preserve semantics across the whole language, so it keeps some parts for the interpreter to process at run-time. And sometimes that's the only option, since code can be generated on-the-fly or pulled over the network: Red is homoiconic and has quite powerful meta-programming facilities on top of that.

te 5 years ago |

Nim or Julia?

UMetaGOMS 5 years ago | |

As someone who doesn't do software development as part of routine day-to-day work but has played with both, I'd describe Julia as "Fortran for Python developers", while Nim feels like "C for Python developers".

My interest in scientific applications pushes me towards Julia, but the user experience has so far been strictly worse than than Python, so I just don't bother with it as much as I might like to.

On the other hand, I am drawn to experiment with Nim (and to some extent Rust as well) because they feel better constructed, having more professional feeling tools and approaches to packaging. The downside is that their core strengths are in use-cases which aren't so aligned with my interests.

The strength of the Python packaging ecosystem makes me doubtful of the impact Julia can have. Meanwhile for Nim, it feels to me like awareness and adoption suffer a fair bit from competing with Rust for mindshare.

ddragon 5 years ago | |

You can pick both, they are very different. Julia is a dynamic language looking for a compromise between interactivity and performance (from it's origin on R/Matlab), while Nim is one of the new batch of static languages that looks for the perfect balance between of easy of development and safety/speed.

For example, if you want to do something more exploratory (like some research or data analysis) that can still easily scale up to HPC you can use Julia, if you want to create something reliable with small binaries and no start-up issues or use in more resource constrained environments you can use Nim.

cb321 5 years ago | | |

Not that @ddragon exactly said you could not, but you can also use Nim for data science, such as https://mratsim.github.io/Arraymancer/ or https://github.com/Vindaar/nimhdf5 or many others and there is a REPL INim mentioned in another comment here. If you want everything "done for you already", Julia has more libraries and it is (for better or worse) more fundamentally dynamic.

boongeheYOE 5 years ago | |

Julia has its specific niche and Nim does not collide with this niche. Nim is more of a general language by far.

samuell 5 years ago |

It is nice with a lot of innovation now in the ahead-of-time compiled languages camp.

What worries me is the fragmentation, and the fact that no one language seems to check all of the (subjective set of) boxes for a general purpose high-speed, ahead-of-time compiled language [0].

E.g, Crystal seems to be the only one supporting a modern concurrency story (similar to Go), but has a huge problem with compile times.

Nim looks nice in many respects, but last I checked, they don't have anything like Go-like concurrency. Maybe not on everyone's wishlist, but as the world move toward flow everything/everywhere[1], I personally find this to be a problem.

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BAiJR026ih1U8HoRw__n...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Architectures-Streaming-Event-Dr...

cb321 5 years ago | |

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9640384

cb321 5 years ago | | |

Also INim at the Nim-2020 conference for a REPL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa_9vut4TzQ&list=PLxLdEZg8DR...

In short, I think at least for the linked to table you mentioned, Nim does check all the boxes.

samuell 5 years ago | | |

Thanks! This is interesting, although I'd be worried about how stable this is for the long term. Would be happy to have my worries annihilated of course :)