NimForUE VS infer

Glad to see that the windows executables are working again.

I had tried a little while ago to test things out on my windows machine after seeing the NimForUE project (https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE) and was sad to see that my computer would auto-mark any nim binaries as malware and delete them. I wasn't too invested so I just shrugged rather than looking for too many workarounds.

For people scared off by C++ and who want faster recompile times, check out the Nim bindings [0]. Check out his Twitter/X account [1] for plenty of cool things it brings to the table.

[0]: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE

[1]: https://twitter.com/_jmgomez_

I started using Nim because i wanted to port some of machine learning models written in python with the idea of making them more portable. It was a lot of work as community is relatively small and a new user would end up writing a lot of code.

But Nim has a pretty solid standard library with clearly written code and an awesome community to help with problems. I generally read a lot of standard library code to expand my knowledge of language and discover common patterns which repeat themselves in a lot of real world problems.

C inter-op is really first class, and as far as i know it has one of best C++ inter-op as well, you can take a look at: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE for a real world example.

I use Nim for my work in both professional and personal capacity and also have written about some of it at https://ramanlabs.in/static/blog/index.html

I've switched over to Unreal and helped out with NimForUE early on. If you have any interest in Unreal, you should check it out since it's in a really good state. It does assume knowledge of Nim, Unreal, and C++ to really get the most out of it.

In NimForUE, we ran into issues with nimble early on, so we resorted to using nim for the build scripts because we needed to do code generation gymnastics to work with Unreal's build system and Nim's C++ codegen. The Nim compiler has had some patches since we first worked on the build system, so maybe if we had to do things over again we could go back to NimScript.

They would be better off just paying the guy developing NimForUE some money and making it first-party.

NimForUE is an Unreal Engine plugin that aims to replace the verbose and tedious C++ with the concise and clean Nim language, supporting blueprints too and giving hot reloading and native speed performance. https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE

(https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE)

I think most development occurs on problems that can't be formally modeled anyway. Most developers work on things like, "can you add this feature to the e-commerce site? And can the pop-up be blue?" which isn't really model-able.

But that's not to say that formal methods are useless! We can still prove some interesting aspects of programs -- for example, that every lock that gets acquired later gets released. I think tools like Infer[0] could become common in the coming years.

[0]: https://fbinfer.com/

Using infer, someone else exploited null-dereference checks to introduce simple affine types in C++. Cppcheck also checks for null-dereferences. Unfortunately, that approach means that borrow-counting references have a larger sizeof than non-borrow counting references, so optimizing the count away potentially changes the semantics of a program which introduces a whole new way of writing subtly wrong code.

Meta/Facebook are long time OCaml users, their logo is on the OCaml website. Their static analysis tool and its predecessor are both written in OCaml.

Then this idea that the US government will tell tech companies how to write secure software. Let's get this straight, the private sector, especially big tech is miles ahead of US government in this regard. Microsoft literally invented threat modelling and modern exploit mitigations. Facebook has the best appsec processes pretty much in the whole world, including their own cutting edge code analyzer. AWS uses formal verification everywhere. Meanwhile the US government itself runs mission-critical systems that's almost literally held together by bubble gum and toothpicks. Maybe they could dial down the arrogance a tad, get their own shit together, learn how this cyber stuff is actually done and only then try lecturing everyone else.

Efforts: Dependabot, CodeQL, Coverity, facebook's Infer tool, etc

I notice there isn't fbinfer. It's pretty cool, and is used for this library.

"Move fast, break stuff" is a great approach when you aren't pushing the broken bits to production. Fuck, even Facebook, the big "move fast, break stuff" company, uses tools to detect errors in its continuous integration toolchain. https://fbinfer.com/

TBH, there's a non-zero amount of non-"ivory tower" tools you may have used that are written in functional languages. Say, Pandoc or Shellcheck are written in Haskell; Infer and Flow are written in OCaml. RabbitMQ and Whatsapp are implemented in Erlang (FB Messenger was too, originally; they switched to the C++ servers later). Twitter backend is (or was, at least) written in Scala.