On Tuesday, 27 March 2018 at 01:25:42 UTC, timotheecour wrote:
D and nim are both very promising.
I created this git repo to compare them:
https://github.com/timotheecour/D_vs_nim/
Goal: up to date and objective comparison of features between D
and nim (to help deciding what language to use), and 1:1 map of
features and libraries to help D users learn nim and vice versa.
PRs are welcome and merged fast
It seems you made up your mind, but some of your points are
definately up to debate:
- ability to write file during CTFE is not necessarily positive.
THough I can't tell why from the top of my mind.
- Nim doesn't lose points for not being able to use heap objects
in CTFE.
- the ability to generate C breaks type system guarantees like
memory safety. It's like how inline assembly breaks optimizers
and type system, and is annoying to implement. It makes the
language more "powerful" hence less easy to reason about.
- Some of use prefer DDoc to Markdown, which is a language where
everything always parses.
- AST macros are not necessarily easier or more tractable, which
have been argued repeatedly by Walter in these forums. The
avoidance of AST macros is a plus, not a minus.
- Likewise, distinction between traced and untraced pointers is
exactly what D designers didn't want.
Last time I tried Nim, the Javascript generation didn't preserve
semantics. You would write "a.member = 2" and it would generate
"a.member = 2", without consideration of memory model. It seems
Nim's memory model depend on whatever language it generates.
