status-desktop VS nimpy

In the meantime, desktop already exists but it's just at the finish line w.r.t. good enough feature set and performance to launch broadly. Go check it out at https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop. This recent tweet also highlights some of the massive performance improvements the desktop team is focused on (which will also immediately be available to the mobile app): https://twitter.com/ethstatus/status/1662857323889524739

The application consists of the combined efforts of the Status organisation and community contributors, you can follow our development at github.com/status-im/ — you're welcome to contribute as well! If you're running into any bugs, we'd love it if you could file an issue in our mobile or desktop repositories.

For those looking for a no-censorship-ever-of-any-kind alternative, consider Status:

https://status.im/get/

If you don't need or want a crypto wallet or dapp browser, then simply don't use those parts of the app.

Relevant specs:

https://specs.status.im/

https://rfc.vac.dev/

Relevant repos:

https://github.com/status-im/status-react

https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

There are trade-offs, for sure: since there's (deliberately) no integration with contacts lists (address books) of the OS or other apps, your social circle probably isn't using the app already, or in any case isn't discoverable.

The public chats facility has turned out to be too spam-prone for "well known" / advertised chats, e.g. #status. However, if you create a public chat that has some unguessable component (e.g. #myfriends-a9e72ab5) and you share it with friends (even lots) in a reasonably private context, then the chances of it being spammed are quite low. Note that public chats, while "public", are still E2EE, using the chat's name as the basis for a symmetric key.

1-to-1 and private group chats are highly secure; the latter have a max size, and depending on their size and your device, sending messages can be a little slow.

Creating a robust alternative to the existing public chats facility has involved a lot of work: the forthcoming Communities features provides a discord-like facility whereby founders/admins of communities can take advantage of various mechanisms for moderation and governing membership. The Communities feature can already be enabled in advanced preferences of both mobile and desktop apps, but note it's a WIP.

The moderation mechanisms for communities don't undermine the no-censorship principle of Status because:

(1) Any user can create a community.

(2) A community's rules are managed by those with a stake in the community, there's no override by Status-the-org nor anyone else.

(3) The underlying nodes of the network form a decentralized p2p network, i.e. there's no central actor/authority that controls the flow of messages.

Re: (3), running a Status node should be easy and incentivized.

The "incentivized" aspect is a challenging problem and not solved yet. Long story short, engineering an incentivized decentralized messaging network (not a blockchain!) is harder than incentivizing a blockchain network.

That being said, the "easy" aspect isn't too difficult to solve, sneak peek:

https://github.com/status-im/status-node

Finally, with pertinent laws and regulations in flux across the globe, there could come a day when binaries aren't readily available (from app stores, GitHub, etc.), but thankfully there's always `git clone` and `make`.

Disclosure: I'm a core contributor at Status.

My only big issue is that it does talk to googleusercontent.com. Not sure how that can fit with privacy. Heres the github issue.

Current numbers re: adoption were discussed in Status' most recent Town Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98wsQe6hHHs&t=365s

As for dev support: Status has teams of full-time devs working on various projects related to the mobile[1] and desktop[2] (beta) apps, as well projects that are related to the larger Ethereum ecosystem, e.g. nimbus-eth2[3]. Our teams aren't particularly large, but are working steadily to squash bugs and add/improve features. We also have teams dedicated to UX and design.

[1] https://github.com/status-im/status-react

[2] https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop

[3] https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2

I mean honestly, the closest language to Mojo really is Nim. In the latest Lex Fridman interview [0] when he talks about his ideas behind Mojo it pretty much sounds like he's describing Nim. Ok fair, he wants Mojo to be a full superset of Python, but honestly with nimpy [1] our Python interop is about as seamless as it can really be (without being a superset, which Mojo clearly is not yet). Even the syntax of Mojo looks a damn lot like Nim imo. Anyway, I guess he has the ability to raise enough funds to hire enough people to write his own language within ~2 years so as not have to follow random peoples whim about where to take the language. So I guess I can't blame him. But as someone who's pretty invested in the Nim community it's quite a shame to see such a hyped language receive so much attention by people who should really check out Nim. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[0]: https://youtu.be/pdJQ8iVTwj8?si=LfPSNDq8UKKIsJd3

[1]: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

You can also do this in Nim, which basically means you can write any program you could in Python with libraries in Nim. https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

Ones that have not been mentioned so far:

nlvm is an unofficial LLVM backend: https://github.com/arnetheduck/nlvm

npeg lets you write PEGs inline in almost normal PEG notation: https://github.com/zevv/npeg

futhark provides for much more automatic C interop: https://github.com/PMunch/futhark

nimpy allows calling Python code from Nim and vice versa: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

questionable provides a lot of syntax sugar surrounding Option/Result types: https://github.com/codex-storage/questionable

ratel is a framework for embedded programming: https://github.com/PMunch/ratel

cps allows arbitrary procedure rewriting to continuation passing style: https://github.com/nim-works/cps

chronos is an alternative async/await backend: https://github.com/status-im/nim-chronos

zero-functional fixes some inefficiencies when chaining list operations: https://github.com/zero-functional/zero-functional

owlkettle is a declarative macro-oriented library for GTK: https://github.com/can-lehmann/owlkettle

A longer list can be found at https://github.com/ringabout/awesome-nim.

I use Python daily for its massive momentum for scientific stuff, but I also use Nim for everything else. Nim compiles to C, and making Python native modules with Nim is easy with Nimpy.

If are a data scientist and come from python take a look at nimpy, a great way to just import python libraries and use them! https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy Numpy, pandas, pytorch all usable in Nim.

Nim is the ultimate glue language, use libraries from anything: python, c, js, objc.

I've come to really enjoy programming in Nim. Note that Nim is very different language despite sharing a similar syntax. However, I feel it keeps a lot of the "feel" of Python 2 days of being a fairly simple neat language but that lets you do things at compile time (like compile time duck typing).

There's a good Python -> Nim bridge: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy

See this nimpy issue about it: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy/issues/43

It has pretty good integration with python, either for having your main code in python and writing small hot functions as nim and importing via nimporter or using python libraries in nim via nimpy.

Related: Nimpy[0] provides an easy way to write Python extensions in Nim, which manages the ABI side very well.

Python 2 is now gone, but until it was, Nimpy was an easy way to write Python extension modules that only needed to be compiled once, and would work with any of your installed Python 2 and Python 3. Magic.

[0] https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy