Our great sponsors
-
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).
-
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.
-
I have done non-trivial things both in Rust and Nim. For big projects Rust seems a little more robust, but for medium and small projects Nim is an order of magnitude faster to develop for. There are still many rough edges, but it's exactly the tradeoffs I would personally pick for my one person small business making tools for artists. So far I have been using Rust and it's alright, but looking very much into Nim to see if I can replace Rust because of the high cognitive load to keep all of the Rust stuff in my head, as I don't really need safety.
Shout out to https://github.com/StefanSalewski/gintro which was super simple to build a simple GUI tool. With Rust I have no idea what to use after trying 5 different libraries.
The downside of Nim seems to be highly unpredictable performance in my experience. With Rust it's much easier to control. This might be a deal-breaker unless I can find some solution to it. Maybe it's just using it more than two weeks and learning the ropes.
My issue is that Nim has some awkward problems with static linking:
https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/15220
> Multiple if let cases
They are a work in progress, available in nightly: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/53667
But they do require an extra level of parens in some cases, though I think that's insignificant.
> Guard Statements
Rust has these now as "let ... else" statements.
let Pattern(binding) = thing else { ... };