ponyc VS Nim

Compare ponyc vs Nim and see what are their differences.

ponyc

Pony is an open-source, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language (by ponylang)

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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ponyc Nim
61 346
5,598 16,060
0.6% 0.8%
9.3 9.9
9 days ago 4 days ago
C Nim
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License 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.

ponyc

Posts with mentions or reviews of ponyc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-06.
  • Old Version
    1 project | /r/PHPhelp | 11 Dec 2023
  • The problem with general purpose programming languages
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Oct 2023
    For example, the actor's model is not used by a lot of languages, Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/) and Elixir are the only ones that I know, but they address the concurrency problem quite well, while it's a pain to deal with in other languages at large scale.
  • Found a language in development called Vale which claims to be the safest AOT compiled language in the World (Claims to beSafer than Rust)
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Jun 2023
    And that last point is critical. If the language flatly can't represent some concepts it uses, they have to be implemented somewhere else. I had a similar discussion with a proponent for Pony once- the language itself is 100% safe, and fully dependent on C for its runtime and data structures. One of Rust's core strengths is being able to express unsafe concepts, meaning the unsafe code can expose a safe interface that accurately describes its requirements rather than an opaque C ABI. Vale doesn't seem to do that.
  • The Rust I wanted had no future
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jun 2023
    "Exterior iteration. Iteration used to be by stack / non-escaping coroutines, which we also called "interior" iteration, as opposed to "exterior" iteration by pointer-like things that live in variables you advance. Such coroutines are now finally supported by LLVM (they weren't at the time) and are actually a fairly old and reliable mechanism for a linking-friendly, not-having-to-inline-tons-of-library-code abstraction for iteration. They're in, like, BLISS and Modula-2 and such. Really normal thing to have, early Rust had them, and they got ripped out for a bunch of reasons that, again, mostly just form "an argument I lost" rather than anything I disagree with today. I wish Rust still had them. Maybe someday it will!"

    I remember that one. The change was shortly after I started fooling with Rust and was major. Major as in it broke all the code that I'd written to that point.

    "Async/await. I wanted a standard green-thread runtime with growable stacks -- essentially just "coroutines that escape, when you need them too"."

    I remember that one, too; it was one of the things that drew me to the language---I was imagining something more like Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/).

    "The Rust I Wanted probably had no future, or at least not one anywhere near as good as The Rust We Got."

    Almost certainly true. But The Rust We Got is A Better C++, which was never appealing to me because I never liked C++ anyway.

  • How long until Rust becomes mandatory, and use of any other language opens the developer up to Reckless Endangerment charges
    1 project | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 20 May 2023
    Pony or bust.
  • Universal parameter passing semantics
    1 project | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 10 May 2023
    If you have a value in mutable storage, and want to treat it as an immutable parameter without copying it first, you will need to provide some way to guarantee that it won't be mutated while being treated as immutable! There doesn't seem to be a definitive best way to do that (although the likes of Pony make a try at it).
  • Virtual Threads Arrive in JDK 21, Ushering a New Era of Concurrency
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2023
    The love child of Erlang and Rust exists already: Pony.

    https://www.ponylang.io

    It really is the best of both languages... unfortunately, the main supporter of Pony seems to have stopped using it in favour of Rust though :D.

    But if that's really what you want, Pony is your language. It definitely deserves more love.

  • Programming language rule
    1 project | /r/196 | 30 Mar 2023
  • Why Turborepo is migrating from Go to Rust – Vercel
    7 projects | /r/golang | 8 Mar 2023
    You can actually try to have a magic language which "does not ignore decades of PL research" but you are likely to get either something broken or a project that is likely not going to release in our lifetime.
  • Show HN: Ractor – a Rust-based actor framework with clusters and supervisors
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2023
    Never a bad time to plug Pony lang[1] - a safety-oriented actor-model language. In addition to the numerous safety guarantees, you also get a beautiful syntax and automatic memory management. Really a great language that often gets overshadowed by Rust's hype-turfing.

    [1]: https://www.ponylang.io/

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 ponyc and Nim you can also consider the following projects:

gleam - ⭐️ A friendly language for building type-safe, scalable systems!

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

Halide - a language for fast, portable data-parallel computation

go - The Go programming language

prolog-to-minizinc - A Prolog-to-MiniZinc translator

Odin - Odin Programming Language

Phoenix - wxPython's Project Phoenix. A new implementation of wxPython, better, stronger, faster than he was before.

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

tab-rs - The intuitive, config-driven terminal multiplexer designed for software & systems engineers

crystal - The Crystal Programming Language

mrustc - Alternative rust compiler (re-implementation)

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