On Monday, 13 April 2015 at 17:28:14 UTC, Timothee Cour wrote:
I think people interested in D should take a closer look at nim
and judge
for yourself ; http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html is a good starting
point (docs
in general are very well written).
I went through their tutorials and here are some first
impressions:
* nim is already bootstrapped (self-compiles)
* feature set is very rich, many features (semantic and syntax)
not found
in D or improving the ones in D, eg hygenic macros,
* many key features of D (static if, type inference, CTFE,
UFCS, lambda,
template constraints).
* The syntax seems more orthogonal with fewer bultin constructs
and many
generated by library, eg: 'a>b is a hygyenic macro that
generates 'b<a';
associative arrays (tables) are in library
* documentation in code uses markdown (less noisy than D's)
* named parameter arguments
* tooling (nimble package manager ~dub, nimfix ~= gofix;
nimgrep ~=
dscanner);
* etc...
less good or tradeoffs:
* C backend instead of (LLVM,gcc or dmd's; but they're working
on it
* uses yield-based ranges instead of D-based ranges (maybe
simpler to write
but less efficient?)
* forward declarations needed (docs says this may change)
* thread-local GC (no stop the world)
* RAII still experimental it seems
* mutually importing modules seem possible; but doc says:
Modules that
depend on each other are possible, but strongly discouraged;
it's very
common in D
* mutually recursive types. In Nim these types can only be
declared within
a single type section. (Anything else would require arbitrary
symbol
lookahead which slows down compilation.)
not sure whether language has those; need to look more in the
docs:
* delegates
* template variadic (but has varargs[T])
* not sure whether we can have template parameters which are
other than a
type
It would be nice to have a wiki page to describe this further
feature by
feature. Many ideas would be great to incorporate in D too btw.
On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 2:26 PM, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d <
[email protected]> wrote:
On Friday, 10 April 2015 at 18:52:24 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
The only things I've read about nim have been on the D forums
- it seems
the wikipedia article is even being considered for deletion
due to not
being noteworthy. So I think you might have trouble finding
any comparisons.
Read the comments sections on other languages on Reddit
programming and
you'll see their spam all over the place.
I've never used Nim (and don't plan to because I've been
turned off by
their constant spamming of comment threads on Reddit) but the
numerous
comments I've seen repeatedly indicate that Nim is not yet
ready for real
use.
I have to say, Nim sounds very interesting and promising. I don't
know how easy it is to integrate C/C++ code, but they have a
foreign function interface:
http://nim-lang.org/manual.html#foreign-function-interface
