gcc VS Nim

Compare gcc vs Nim and see what are their differences.

Nim

Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority). (by nim-lang)
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gcc Nim
81 346
8,704 16,060
1.9% 0.8%
9.9 9.9
6 days ago 2 days ago
C Nim
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

gcc

Posts with mentions or reviews of gcc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-12.
  • C++ Safety, in Context
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Mar 2024
    > It's true, this was a CVE in Rust and not a CVE in C++, but only because C++ doesn't regard the issue as a problem at all. The problem definitely exists in C++, but it's not acknowledged as a problem, let alone fixed.

    Can you find a link that substantiates your claim? You're throwing out some heavy accusations here that don't seem to match reality at all.

    Case in point, this was fixed in both major C++ libraries:

    https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/ebf6175464768983a2d...

    https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/4f67a909902d8ab9...

    So what C++ community refused to regard this as an issue and refused to fix it? Where is your supporting evidence for your claims?

  • Std: Clamp generates less efficient assembly than std:min(max,std:max(min,v))
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2024
  • Converting the Kernel to C++
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2024
    Somewhat related: In 2020 gcc bumped the requirement for bootstrapping to be a C++11 compiler [0]. Would have been fun to see the kernel finally adopt C++14 as the author suggested.

    I don't think that Linus will allow this since he just commented that he will allow rust in drivers and major subsystems [1].

    I do found it pretty funny that even Linus is also not writing any rust code, but is reading rust code.

    I would have hoped see more answers or see something in here from actual kernel developers.

    0: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/5329b59a2e13dabbe20...

  • Understanding Objective-C by transpiling it to C++
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Dec 2023
    > They’re saying that a lot of the restrictions makes things much harder than other languages. Hence the general problem rust has where a lot of trivial tasks in other languages are extremely challenging.

    Like what? So far the discussion has revolved around rewriting a linked list, which people generally shouldn't ever need to do because it's included in the standard lib for most languages. And it's a decidedly nontrivial task to do as well as the standard lib when you don't sacrifice runtime overhead to be able to handwave object lifecycle management.

    - C++: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc%2B%2B-...

    - Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/src/alloc/collections/linked_...

    > No need to get defensive, no one is arguing that rust doesn’t do a lot of things well.

    That's literally what bsaul is arguing in another comment. :)

    > You’re talking up getting a safe implementation in C, but what matters is “can I get the same level of safety with less complexity in any language”, and the answer is yes: Java and c# implementations of a thread safe linked list are trivial.

    Less perceived complexity. In Java and C# you're delegating the responsibility of lifecycle management to garbage collectors. For small to medium scale web apps, the added complexity will be under the hood and you won't have to worry about it. For extreme use cases, the behavior and overhead of the garbage collector does became relevant.

    If you factor in the code for the garbage collector that Java and C# depend on, the code complexity will tilt dramatically in favor of C++ or Rust.

    However, it's going to be non-idiomatic to rewrite a garbage collector in Java or C# like it is to rewrite a linked list in Rust. If we consider the languages as they're actually used, rather than an academic scenario which mostly crops up when people expect the language to behave like C or Java, the comparison is a lot more favorable than you're framing it as.

    > If I wanted I could do it in c++ though the complexity would be more than c# and Java it would be easier than rust.

    You can certainly write a thread-safe linked list in C++, but then the enforcement of any assumptions you made about using it will be a manual burden on the user. This isn't just a design problem you can solve with more code - C++ is incapable of expressing the same restrictions as Rust, because doing so would break compatibility with C++ code and the language constructs needed to do so don't exist.

    So it's somewhat apples and oranges here. Yes, you may have provided your team with a linked list, but it will either

  • Committing to Rust for Kernel Code
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Nov 2023
    GCC is also written in C++, and has had C++ deps since 2013:

    https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/c/c-parser...

  • Spitbol 360: an implementation of SNOBOL4 for IBM 360 compatible computers
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Nov 2023
  • are most computer programming languages public domain, or do their creators get a say in what you do with them?
    1 project | /r/NoStupidQuestions | 7 Oct 2023
    Compliers/Interpreters are also very commonly open source (here is the source code for a popular C compiler). That means you can even modify the compiler's code and change its behavior if you wanted to.
  • Learn to write production quality STL like classes
    4 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 28 Jun 2023
  • Which compiler is conforming here?
    1 project | /r/cpp | 9 Jun 2023
    according to this commit, the story here seems to be much more interessting than I initially anticipated.
  • My favorite C compiler flags during development
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Apr 2023
    For a more detailed explanation, see [2]. (Also the inspiration for the above example,)

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_relation

    [2] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/50ddbd0282e06614b29...

Nim

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-06.
  • Top Paying Programming Technologies 2024
    19 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2024
    22. Nim - $80,000
  • "14 Years of Go" by Rob Pike
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    I think the right answer to your question would be NimLang[0]. In reality, if you're seeking to use this in any enterprise context, you'd most likely want to select the subset of C++ that makes sense for you or just use C#.

    [0]https://nim-lang.org/

  • Odin Programming Language
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: Interest in a Rust-Inspired Language Compiling to JavaScript?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
    I don't think it's a rust-inspired language, but since it has strong typing and compiles to javascript, did you give a look at nim [0] ?

    For what it takes, I find the language very expressive without the verbosity in rust that reminds me java. And it is also very flexible.

    [0] : https://nim-lang.org/

  • The nim website and the downloads are insecure
    1 project | /r/nim | 11 Dec 2023
    I see a valid cert for https://nim-lang.org/
  • Nim
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
    FYI, on the front page, https://nim-lang.org, in large type you have this:

    > Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula.

  • Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
    You better off with using a compiled language.

    If you interested in a language that's compiled, fast, but as easy and pleasant as Python - I'd recommend you take a look at [Nim](https://nim-lang.org).

    And to prove what Nim's capable of - here's a cool repo with 100+ cli apps someone wrote in Nim: [c-blake/bu](https://github.com/c-blake/bu)

  • Mojo is now available on Mac
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Oct 2023
    Chapel has at least several full-time developers at Cray/HPE and (I think) the US national labs, and has had some for almost two decades. That's much more than $100k.

    Chapel is also just one of many other projects broadly interested in developing new programming languages for "high performance" programming. Out of that large field, Chapel is not especially related to the specific ideas or design goals of Mojo. Much more related are things like Codon (https://exaloop.io), and the metaprogramming models in Terra (https://terralang.org), Nim (https://nim-lang.org), and Zig (https://ziglang.org).

    But Chapel is great! It has a lot of good ideas, especially for distributed-memory programming, which is its historical focus. It is more related to Legion (https://legion.stanford.edu, https://regent-lang.org), parallel & distributed Fortran, ZPL, etc.

  • NIR: Nim Intermediate Representation
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 2 Oct 2023
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Sep 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing gcc and Nim you can also consider the following projects:

CMake - Mirror of CMake upstream repository

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

rtl8192eu-linux-driver - Drivers for the rtl8192eu chipset for wireless adapters (D-Link DWA-131 rev E1 included!)

go - The Go programming language

llvm-project - The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.

Odin - Odin Programming Language

STL - MSVC's implementation of the C++ Standard Library.

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

cobol-on-wheelchair - Micro web-framework for COBOL

crystal - The Crystal Programming Language

busybox - The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux - private tree

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io