Nim Version 1.6.6 Released

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • 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).

    For all those who are really interested in the language and have at least a small amount of experience with it already: Nim is ripe for contributing!

    While the main team works on bigger things drawing v2 closer, there's still lots of issues of various magnitude and lots of housekeeping bits that can be done while getting yourself acquainted with the project's structure.

    Here's a few links for your consideration:

    - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aope...

    - https://dev.to/xflywind/best-ways-to-make-your-first-contrib...

    - https://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/contributing.html

  • RFCs

    A repository for your Nim proposals. (by nim-lang)

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • Arraymancer

    A fast, ergonomic and portable tensor library in Nim with a deep learning focus for CPU, GPU and embedded devices via OpenMP, Cuda and OpenCL backends

  • nimskull

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

    I started programming in Nim around 2015 and still write code in it from time to time. At this point I would have a tough time suggesting the language to anyone for much. While you can certainly accomplish almost any programming task with Nim, how much frustration you will encounter fighting the compiler and broken / under-specified language features and semantics might be a turn-off. There are other major warts with Nim, which I'll outline briefly below.

    1) Nim's leadership is awful and has always been historically. Those in charge of managing the community are more interested in their personal reputation's and resumes than they are actually contributing working software to the language's ecosystem. Even the BDFL treats Nim like their own personal compiler R&D playground. There are so many broken features in Nim which never see the light of day or never get removed.

    2) Continuing to expand on the point above, the Nim compiler has become insanely difficult to work on. As more and more half-baked features have been added to the language, the situation has only worsened. There are many would-be contributors who have come into the community only to leave completely frustrated or appalled by the lack of interest in improving the situation from those leading the community.

    3) The development path is driven by leadership and not the community, and leadership has no plan. This was extremely evident last year when Araq and others were asked for a roadmap for Nim and they admitted to not having one, and basically wrote one up in a forum thread. Araq and dom96 and a few others, especially those who have been brave enough to actually deploy Nim code in production (looking at you status.im) tend to dictate what gets worked on or fixed. There is no coordination amongst folks working on initiatives. You can look at the `fusion` project, which was started by Nim's leadership, drew contributors in, and then was abandoned by leadership while maintainers were left on the hook to keep things afloat until they too dumped the project.

    Things have gotten so bad, that a hard fork has been in development since last year, and many of the more senior community members or those who have been around for a bit have migrated there: https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull

    Nim's community now consists of mostly new members or folks who weren't really active in it before, but maybe used Nim. Of course, the leadership remains in place, but there are only a handful of folks remaining that have been around for more than a year or two. Mostly those who bit the bullet on using Nim in production or built large projects with Nim and are stuck maintaining them.

    My advice would be to look elsewhere.

  • Datamancer

    A dataframe library with a dplyr like API

  • pan

    puny animator – create motion graphics using Lua

    > unless you limittest generics, most people wont even encounter this.

    I don't think my totally normal usage of generics for type safety could be called "stretching the limits." My usage of generics includes using a parameter [V] for OpenGL meshes to introduce type safety with the vertex type. I'm pretty sure that's perfectly normal?

    Recently one of my friends tried compiling my project - pan[1] on Windows, and for whatever reason - it doesn't work! stating that it "cannot instantiate 'V'", whatever that means. I've had this error annoy me many times before, but I have no clue what triggers it or how to reproduce it reliably. Call this a 'stable implementation.'

    [1]: https://github.com/liquidev/pan

  • aglet

    A safe, high-level, optimized OpenGL wrapper and context manager.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • enu

    A Logo-like 3D environment, implemented in Nim

    Nothing here is untrue, but from my perspective it's overstated. I don't use discord, but I visit the forum daily, follow most of the RFCs, and spend a lot of time coding in Nim (https://github.com/dsrw/enu). I really like Nim, mostly like its community, and think many more people should be using it.

    I'm sure fusion could have been handled better, and for 2021 the roadmap was a bit hazy, but I can't think of any other big missteps. Araq, dom, PMunch, and other senior folks are in the forms helping people and answering questions every day, and my interactions with all of them has been very positive. The big post 1.0 feature was arc/orc, and that was very well communicated. Bugs are being fixed, useful new features are being added, and future plans are being discussed in the open.

    And Nim itself is great. The "if it compiles, it works" factor is high, yet I almost never feel like the compiler is fighting me. Simple things are simple (I'm teaching it to a group of 12 year olds), it's incredibly flexible, it's fast, and it's suitable for almost any sort of problem. There's nothing else like it, and I expect I'd continue using it for at least a decade even if it switched into maintenance mode tomorrow. I think it will take at least that long for something better to come along.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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