> So far I can see it adding overhead and boilerplate but not much benefit.
To the already mentioned benefits smaller executable size and much more important deterministic memory deallocation adds. With GC, we have noticed that we set refs to nil or ref objects go out of scope, but the GC hesitate to release the memory. Using Nim without the GC would be a very big benefit for the area of embedded devices and microcontrollers, often with only a few 10 kB of ram and realtime requirements. And I have the hope that we often do not realize at all that we have no GC: Strings and seqs just work, as do destructors. Similar as we can sometimes write C++ code just using containers like vectors from std lib, without the need to allocate memory directly.
