terra VS Nim

Compare terra vs Nim and see what are their differences.

terra

Terra is a low-level system programming language that is embedded in and meta-programmed by the Lua programming language. (by terralang)

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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terra Nim
38 346
2,665 16,060
0.8% 0.8%
5.7 9.9
18 days ago 3 days ago
C++ Nim
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later 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.

terra

Posts with mentions or reviews of terra. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-19.
  • 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.

  • Why Fennel?
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
  • Two-tier programming language
    6 projects | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 19 Apr 2023
    Terra is the language you're looking for: https://terralang.org/
  • Using Lua with C++
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2023
  • Bog – small, strongly typed, embeddable language
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2023
  • Nelua, AOT statically typed Lua
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2023
    Wow, amazing stuff. I love Lua, it was how I learned programming as a kid. Coincidently from the same world as the author. Open Tibia.

    The author made a custom client (https://github.com/edubart/otclient) for the game that is still very much in active use by thousands of players. He's a very skilled developer.

    Great to see AOT typed Lua, I know of the other solutions: Luau, Teal, TypeScriptToLua, Terra, etc., but this one is my favorite so far.

    Love the simple compilation to C (and WASM support via Emscripten). Though Terra's JIT is enticing and good replacement for LuaJIT, this is for embedded systems, it's a good replacement for Lua PUC-Rio.

    The World:

    - https://luau-lang.org/

    - https://terralang.org/

    - https://github.com/teal-language/tl

    - https://typescripttolua.github.io/

  • Idris: A Language for Type-Driven Development
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2023
    Terra is a language that can also do that, and uses Lua as the metaprogramming language. Types are just Lua values.

    But unfortunately, there's a lot of work left kind of half-baked so using the language is a pain... if someone invested a lot of time to make Terra work properly and added some tooling around it, wrote proper docs and so on, it would be a really interesting language.

    https://terralang.org/

  • OOP in C
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jan 2023
  • Noob question about what's possible with comptime
    1 project | /r/Zig | 14 Dec 2022
    (I am slightly familiar with a language called Terra (https://terralang.org), which couples C with Lua, where the Lua is basically used as the metaprogramming layer ... sort of like comptime in Zig. And making an SOA data structure is the kind of thing you could do in Lua in Terra. So that was partly the basis for my question).
  • Upcoming RISC-V laptop promises free silicon upgrades
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jul 2022
    > why can't the hardware designer do something simple and clean

    If it was easy, it would not need firmware in the first place. Firmware is there because people expect certain features and quality of life. See softmodems.

    > write some assembly (without abusing the assembler preprocessor...)

    You want https://terralang.org/ and not "just C"/"just Assembler" instead ?

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 terra and Nim you can also consider the following projects:

nelua-lang - Minimal, efficient, statically-typed and meta-programmable systems programming language heavily inspired by Lua, which compiles to C and native code.

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

LuaJIT - Mirror of the LuaJIT git repository

go - The Go programming language

Odin - Odin Programming Language

ravi - Ravi is a dialect of Lua, featuring limited optional static typing, JIT and AOT compilers

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

titan - The Titan programming language

crystal - The Crystal Programming Language

Lua-RTOS-ESP32 - Lua RTOS for ESP32

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