Hey jlp765,
I noticed that the benchmarks game website actually has a page somewhere
explaining that they are not going to add Crystal, Nim and other new and
upcoming languages ("so please stop asking" they say). The suggestion from the
creator is that you make your own website for those languages, separate to the
benchmarks game. I can't find the link at the moment, but I think it is
basically due to wanting to keep it to the most commonly used languages.
But I agree, Nim needs a way to make itself known, but I think that probably
requires a few things first judging by some of the reactions that pop up on
reddit/hackernews/ycombinator:
1. Reaching 1.0 stability - there might be little point advertising an
unfinished product, unless it is to get people to help finish it. A lot of the
time it seems people come in and say "Oh, it isn't stable yet? I'll wait until
my project isn't going to break before trying it.". I think there might be more
help gained from advertising it as an opportunity to contribute and help build
out the language. I know Rust gets the community pretty involved with things
like:
[https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/05/libz-blitz.html](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/05/libz-blitz.html),
I'm not sure how easy that would be, but maybe if we are lacking certain
libraries or they are not well maintained then it might be worth asking for
help from and directing the community a little more in order to help get to 1.0
quicker or have a more complete ecosystem when it does reach 1.0.
2. A popular package that raises awareness and brings people in due to
showing Nim's strengths - rather than trying to force it on people, which they
can see as obnoxious. My guess is this will be in gaming or
scientific/financial/data analysis based off what I've seen the most effort put
into on Github.
3. More/better documentation. While the documentation is probably extensive
enough, there isn't a great volume of simple examples and tutorials to go
through, and perhaps the documentation isn't so easy for a beginner looking in,
at least in my opinion, and is probably geared more towards experienced
programmers as it assumes a bit of knowledge.
Anyway, my thoughts looking in as a relative newcomer and seeing performance
benchmarks probably aren't the biggest stumbling blocks that Nim faces in
trying to grow in popularity.
