nimbus-eth1 VS nim-stint

It certainly seems it will be remembered as a major success story for open p2p protocols on the global Internet of our time.

A great multitude of developers and enthusiasts belonging or contributing to diverse teams spread across the world: developing, debating, and collaborating for years to arrive at the big event.

And it's all been done very much in the public view:

https://weekinethereumnews.com/

https://hackmd.io/@benjaminion/eth2_news

https://github.com/ethereum/pm

https://www.youtube.com/c/EthereumFoundation/videos

Consensus Clients:

https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse#readme

https://github.com/ChainSafe/lodestar#readme

https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2#readme

https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm#readme

https://github.com/ConsenSys/teku#readme

Execution Clients:

https://github.com/akula-bft/akula#readme

https://github.com/hyperledger/besu#readme

https://github.com/ledgerwatch/erigon#readme

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum#readme

https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind#readme

https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth1#readme

https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth1 (yes, this is also for eth2, see "About" at top right)

I expect we will see a "merged" client in the future. Nimbus could be the closest of anyone to this vision (nimbus-eth1, nimbus-eth2). Not sure when this will happen though. Anyways, you have to remember -- these are two extremely complicated pieces of software. Just the interface between the two has been developed and tests over the last 18 months. I think there will always need to be serious encapsulation of logic for it to be maintainable.

> I think the message is more nuanced

I thought it was more nuanced too as they were explaining how integer types can be derived, until I finished the article, and they really did just seem to be complaining that there's a mismatch between compile time and run time.

Dynamic types don't really solve the problems they mention as far as I can tell either (perhaps I am misunderstanding), they just don't provide any guarantees at all and so "work" in the loosest sense.

> otherwise wouldn't lisp with its homoiconicity and compile time macros fit the bill perfectly?

That's a good point, I do wonder why they didn't mention Lisp at all.

> we don't have a solution yet

What they want to do can, as far as I can see, be implemented in Nim easily in a standard, imperative form, without any declarative shenanigans. Indeed, it is implemented here: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/ce44cf03cc4a78741c423b2...

Of course, that implementation is more complex than the one in the article because it handles a lot more.

At the end of the day, it's really a capability mismatch at the language level and the author even states this:

> Programming languages ought to be rethought.

I'd argue that Nim has been 'rethought' specifically to address the issues they mention. The language was built with extension in mind, and whilst the author states that macros are a bad thing, I get the impression this is because most languages implement them as tacked on substitution mechanisms (Rust/D), and/or are declarative rather than "simple" imperative processes. IMHO, most people want to write general code for compile time work (like Zig), not learn a new sub-language. The author states this as well.

Nim has a VM for running the language at compile time so you can do whatever you want, including the recursive type decomposition (for example: https://github.com/status-im/nim-stint). It also has 'real' macros that aren't substitutions but work on the core AST directly, can inspect types at compile time, and is a system language but also high level. It seems to solve their problems, but of course, they simply might not have used or even heard of it.