nesper VS pixie

I use Nim on embedded precisely for that reason: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper

I wtapped much of zephyr as well but that ones less used: https://github.com/embeddednim/nephyr

Nim supports both since it compiles with pretty much any C89 C compiler. Also https://github.com/elcritch/nesper :)

Checkout Nim! I've used it to great effect for embedded programming. It has memory management system based on non-atomic reference counting (arc) so its fast and deterministic. It has optional cycle collection too (orc). Its easy to mixin manual memory as well.

I used F# a bit and learned a lot from it, and the same with Elixir. Nim is procedural it has an "enlightened procedural" take that feels like functional programming in some ways. Partly thats due to the very powerful type system - for example Nim lets you define custom distinct (not aliased) number types just like F#. Nim also inherits a fair bit from Pascal and so shares points with Ada like ints with custom ranges. Theres some rough points, but largely its made me enjoy programming again.

The esp32 is a good route since they're easy to setup. I wrote a wrapper for esp-idf which is used in production in at least two embedded shops: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper

You can run it on Arduinos as well. Theres a pure Nim setup called Ratel and a rp2040 wrapper too. :)

You should checkout Nim! I use it extensively on embedded. Nim is fantastic to program in if you're an experienced C/C++ developer. Its safer and smarter but not not pedantic about it.

Nim compiles to C or C++ so its easy to use on any embedded platform and compiler suite. Thats still huge for embedded. Rust forces a type-trait centric programming style which makes interfacing hardware/embedded harder as you have to make type heavy HALs everywhere -- hence the lack of rtos & library support despite its relative popularity).

Its pretty trivial to re-use any C/C++ libraries which gives a big boost to the native ecosystem. I wrapped most of the esp32 idf in a few weeks: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper

The new GC (ARC) is basically a built in `shared_ptr` or `Rc`. You can also do stack-based programming too and the compiler enforces a safe memory accesses. The performance is great and can match or beat C/C++ if you do a few hours of tuning. Though its easy kill performance if you're lazy (e.g. parse json into a bunch of heaps objects), but that can have its place.

I would really like to see more work on improving the use of Nim for programming microcontrollers. I stumbled on to https://github.com/elcritch/nesper recently and it looks neat, but I had issues getting my code to compile. Improved support for other MCUs like the esp8266 and atmega32u4 would be really cool and useful. It would be nice to have Nim as a higher level alternative to micropython or lua in the embedded world (your only other real alternatives being C/C++ or Rust).

I also found this https://disconnected.systems/blog/nim-on-adruino

Well no language is perfect, but Nim can be used in almost every domain because of it's compilation targets(C, C++, JS) and it's fast compile times(who needs interpretation when compile times are that fast!):

* Shell scripting, I still assume most people will just use Bash tho: https://github.com/Vindaar/shell

* Frontend: https://github.com/karaxnim/karax or you could bind to an existing JS library.

* Backend: For something Flask-like: https://github.com/dom96/jester or something with more defaults https://github.com/planety/prologue

* Scientific computing: the wonderful SciNim https://github.com/SciNim

* Blockchain: Status has some of the biggest Nim codebases currently in production https://github.com/status-im?q=&type=&language=nim&sort=

* Gamedev: Also used in production: https://github.com/pragmagic/godot-nim and due to easy C and C++ interop, you get access to a lot of gamedev libraries!

* Embedded: this is a domain I know very little about but for example https://github.com/elcritch/nesper or https://github.com/PMunch/badger for fun Nim+embedded stuff!

Most of the disadvantages come from tooling and lack of $$$ support.

Not quite sure if I follow what you're saying. As in Tasmota/Berry do or do not do more than provide I2C/SPI?

> If one wants to do serious stuff they would use an appropriate RTOS and program it in C.

It's unfortunate, but still largely appears to be the case. I find C very time consuming to program, so I ported Nim to FreeRTOS [1]. It's _very_ nice being able to go from writing highly optimized ISR functions to high level JSON parsing in one language. Add in defaulting to memory safety but with no pause-the-world GC. I tried Rust but it seems more difficult to integrate into existing world RTOS'es, flashers, Swagger debuggers, etc.

Though, I've been curious what running a WASM VM would be like? One could integrate any language: C++, C, Nim, Rust, etc. Would be interesting.

> MongooseOS does more than this if we're talking ESP32, also other devices, Javascript, C, C++, commercial support, cloud based OTA upgrades and integration with AWS, Azure, Google and IBM Watson IoT cloud services.

MongooseOS does seem interesting, but very targeting a niche market with prebuilt needs? For future RTOS'es I think ZephyrOS [2] has a lot of potential given it's now supported by NXP [3], TI, and others but is independent of any given (cloud) vendors or other IoT companies. Some might not like the CMake based build system, but in my view all the RTOS build systems are terrible in their own special way.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper

We have written pixie: https://github.com/treeform/pixie . Pixie is a 2D graphics library similar to Cairo and Skia written entirely in Nim. Which I think is a big accomplishment. It even has python bindings: https://pypi.org/project/pixie-python/

I made it because I really like pixie/boxy/windy combo, but there is no gamepad support built-in.

With Nim, you can continuously optimize and improve the hot spots in your code. For example, in the Pixie graphics library, path filling started with floating point code, switched to floating point SIMD, then to 16-bit integer SIMD. Finally, this SIMD was written for both x86 and ARM.

The author Fidget actually has a number of other great libraries that are part of the rendering stack. Notably, Pixie for text and shape rendering in 2D, Boxy for rendering textures to the GPU via opengl, and then Windy for an OS window context and user events, and a number of other libraries related to 3D rendering.

Perhaps not the "best" source code I've ever read, but libVF.io had some beautiful code for what's generally gnarly system-glue code. The iommu setup code is a good example and inspires me to think that system-glue code doesn't need to be gross or impenetrable: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/blob/master/src/libv...

Another one I've appreciated reading (and learned more about 2d graphics from) is Pixie, a 2d graphics library written in Nim. Here's the implementation of a fair subset of SVG paths: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/path...

And one last one for basic algorithms: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/version-1-6/lib/pure/al...

Of course Knuth's original code is still some of the best classic code. K&R's original C book is a classic.

I recently helped work on a new open source JPEG decoder in Nim. (Over here on GitHub: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/file...)

This video was extremely helpful to understand the "why" of all the things the spec was trying to explain. It made a huge difference in us being able to get things working.

We talk a bit about JPEG and actually writing our decoder in Nim here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwD7OynFcg

Overall, our concluding opinion is that JPEG has some extremely cool and really smart ideas for how to compress images but the binary file format itself has some very painful things in it (progressive and restart markers as a couple examples).

I am working on OpenStreetMap renderer in Nim - see https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/ (but work somewhat stalled)

I needed some language which is:

- compiled to binaries

- and really fast

- has needed libraries (HTTP server, protocol buffers, sqlite and image generation)

- it's easy to set up

It was nice experience and Nim simply worked for my needs. People on Nim forum were nice and helped me when I ran into problems. It has nice and usable built-in library and I was really impressed by graphic library pixie - https://github.com/treeform/pixie

I would use Nim again when I when I will see this application is suited for it (e.g. some command line apps).

> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written...

Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme

Thank you for all the things you've made for Nim!

A 2d graphics library like Nim’s pixie