proposal VS Nim

Compare proposal vs Nim and see what are their differences.

proposal

Go Project Design Documents (by golang)

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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proposal Nim
46 346
3,276 16,005
0.5% 0.9%
4.4 9.9
14 days ago 3 days ago
Go Nim
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" 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.

proposal

Posts with mentions or reviews of proposal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-20.
  • Does Go Have Subtyping?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2023
    The conclusion is pretty weird to me.

    Go does rely on monomorphization for generics, just like C++ and Rust. The only difference is that this is an implementation detail, so Go can group multiple monomorphizations without worrying about anything else [1]. This form of hybrid monomorphization is being increasingly common, GHC does that and Rust is also trying to do so [2], so nothing special for Go here.

    On the other hand, explaining variance as a lifted polymorphism is---while not incorrect per se---also weird in part because a lack of variance is at worst just an annoyance. You can always make an adopter to unify heterogeneous types. Rust calls it `Box`, Go happens to call it an interface type instead. Both languages even do not allow heterogeneous concrete (or runtime) types in a single slice! So variance has no use in both languages because no concrete types are eligible for variance anyway.

    I think the conclusion got weird because the term "subtyping" is being misused. Subtyping, in the broadest sense, is just a non-trivial type relation. Many languages thus have a multiple notion of subtyping, often (almost) identical to each other but sometimes not. Go in particular has a lot of them, and even some relation like "T implements U" is a straightforward record subtyping. It is no surprise that the non-uniform value representation has the largest influence, and only monomorphization schemes and hetero-to-homogeneous adapters vary in this particular group.

    [1] https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/generi...

    [2] https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/working-groups/pol...

  • Backward Compatibility, Go 1.21, and Go 2
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023
    > I wonder: why not go further and say "there will never be a Go 2" in order to eliminate ambiguity about this?

    They did, five years ago. Albeit with an “if”.

    https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/d661ed19a203000b7c54...

    > If the above process works as planned, then in an important sense there never will be a Go 2. Or, to put it a different way, we will slowly transition to new language and library features. We could at any point during the transition decide that now we are Go 2, which might be good marketing. Or we could just skip it (there has never been a C 2.0, why have a Go 2.0?).

    > Popular languages like C, C++, and Java never have a version 2. In effect, they are always at version 1.N, although they use different names for that state. I believe that we should emulate them. In truth, a Go 2 in the full sense of the word, in the sense of an incompatible new version of the language or core libraries, would not be a good option for our users. A real Go 2 would, perhaps unsurprisingly, be harmful.

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023
  • Why Turborepo is migrating from Go to Rust – Vercel
    7 projects | /r/golang | 8 Mar 2023
    Go Team wanted generics since the start. It was always a problem implementing them without severely hurting compile time and creating compilation bloat. Rust chose to ignore this problem, by relying on LLVM backend for optimizations and dead code elimination.
  • Major standard library changes in Go 1.20
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2023
    As far as I can tell, the consensus for generics was "it will happen, but we really want to get this right, and it's taking time."

    I know some people did the knee-jerk attacks like "Go sucks, it should have had generics long ago" or "Go is fine, it doesn't need generics". I don't think we ever needed to take those attitudes seriously.

    > Will error handling be overhauled or not?

    Error handling is a thorny issue. It's the biggest complaint people have about Go, but I don't think that exceptions are obviously better, and the discriminated unions that power errors in Rust and some other languages are conspicuously absent from Go. So you end up with a bunch of different proposals for Go error handling that are either too radical or little more than syntactic sugar. The syntactic sugar proposals leave much to be desired. It looks like people are slowly grinding through these proposals until one is found with the right balance to it.

    I honestly don't know what kind of changes to error handling would appear in Go 2 if/when it lands, and I think the only reasonable answer right now is "wait and find out". You can see a more reasonable proposal here:

    https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/go2dra...

    Characterizing it as a "lack of vision" does not seem fair here--I started using Rust back in the days when boxed pointers had ~ on them, and it seemed like it took Rust a lot of iterations to get to the current design. Which is fine. I am also never quite sure what is going to get added to future versions of C#.

    I am also not quite sure why Go gets so much hate on Hacker News--as far as I can tell, people have more or less given up on criticizing Java and C# (it's not like they've ossified), and C++ is enough of a dumpster fire that it seems gauche to point it out.

  • What's the status of the various "Go 2" proposals?
    2 projects | /r/golang | 15 Nov 2022
    As it says on that page - those were not proposals. They were draft ideas to get feedback on. You can see the list of proposals in this repository: https://github.com/golang/proposal
  • An alternative memory limiter for Go based on GC tuning and request throttling
    2 projects | /r/golang | 5 Oct 2022
    Approximately a year ago we faced with a necessity of limiting Go runtime memory consumption and started work on our own memory limiter. At the same time, Michael Knyszek published his well-known proposal. Now we have our own implementation quite similar to what has been released in 1.18, but there are two key differences:
  • Shaving 40% off Google’s B-Tree Implementation with Go Generics
    2 projects | /r/golang | 7 Aug 2022
  • I did something evil
    8 projects | /r/golang | 24 Jun 2022
    They actually didn't.
  • On a potential "Partial Monomorphization"
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 14 Jun 2022
    Also take a look at https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/generics-implementation-gcshape.md. This is a hybrid approach (like the one you're talking about) the Go compiler takes for its generics implementation. It uses GC allocation size classes ("shapes") to figure out how to group types that need to be monomorphized.

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.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

go - The Go programming language

Odin - Odin Programming Language

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

crystal - The Crystal Programming Language

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

haxe - Haxe - The Cross-Platform Toolkit

nimskull - An in development statically typed systems programming language; with sustainability at its core. We, the community of users, maintain it.

node - Node.js JavaScript runtime ✨🐢🚀✨

julia - The Julia Programming Language

NumPy - The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.

rust - Rust for the xtensa architecture. Built in targets for the ESP32 and ESP8266