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kevin_thibedeau · 2017-08-24 04:32:47+00:00

Nim is not a Win32 runtime. It outputs strings to stdout. Any sane OS would do the right thing in 2017.

benboughton1 | karma 50 | avg karma 0.98 · | 2020-12-22 04:17:02+00:00

Cool. Read this with interest. I want to give Nim a shot. Is there a compiled Windows binary of your program I can try out?

nmz | karma 527 | avg karma 1.1 · | 2023-08-18 18:48:13

I don't see how this solves anything, Nim's backend is C, which means it should suffer from the same pitfalls. They probably clean it up and eliminate UB, but it should still exist.

wyldfire | karma 20828 | avg karma 4.03 · | 2022-02-07 08:06:56

But Nim uses a C backend, right? So this should put it in a good position to compare well with C, I'd assume.

EDIT: Downvoters - is that not the case?

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kevin_thibedeau | karma 19088 | avg karma 2.16 · | 2017-08-24 03:35:59

It's not really Nim's fault that cmd.exe has crap Unicode support.

nimmer | karma 277 | avg karma 1.24 · | 2017-07-21 08:25:24

Nim runs even on microcontrollers and produces tiny executables (few kilobytes).

thalesmello | karma 76 | avg karma 2.3 · | 2014-12-29 19:08:16

I don't see a problem with that. Since Nim compiles to C, it's only natural for people to take advantage of existing C libraries.

atilaneves | karma 677 | avg karma 2.74 · | 2020-02-19 17:06:32+00:00

While nice, one still has to manually declare a Nim proc and tell it whence it came from. That's not the same.

guggle | karma 473 | avg karma 1.73 · | 2020-01-06 12:44:52+00:00

Thank you.

> I don't know Nim, but I believe it has a garbage collector so it could be tricky to use for kernel programming.

You're right. Still good for libraries though (or apps, but that may be outside of "system").

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Nimitz14 | karma 648 | avg karma 1.08 · | 2019-10-20 23:44:15+00:00

Yeah I was hoping Nim would be it but I don't like the syntax they use.

Sir_Cmpwn | karma 19702 | avg karma 5.33 · | 2018-03-14 10:51:25

Oh please please no! Nim is almost impossible to debug at a low level and you have no fine-grained control over its performance or behavior. It's also far less well understood than C, which is more boring and the subject of decades of conservative development. I'm also not sure what kind of support nim has for freestanding programs.

int_19h | karma 21203 | avg karma 1.69 · | 2022-07-07 17:56:34

Nim is compiled, so a dependency on a runtime or a VM is not an issue there, at least.

jxy | karma 1279 | avg karma 2.41 · | 2017-01-09 17:12:38+00:00

I have love-hate relationship with Nim. It's the best C alternative I can find for our high performance supercomputing needs, yet it breaks my code [0] (yes, it's broken with 0.16.0 now) every single new release for the past year.

[0] https://github.com/jxy/tpl

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Maxatar | karma 428 | avg karma 2.28 · | 2024-05-14 01:14:14

Nim is not memory safe and doesn't technically claim to be. What they claim is to provide memory safe features, but then so does C++ and a lot of other languages.

shirleyquirk | karma 202 | avg karma 2.62 · | 2021-12-17 04:28:01

leaving (e.g.)runtime overflow checks turned on in the Nim code would not be a realistic comparison against C

nimmer | karma 277 | avg karma 1.24 · | 2019-10-11 05:20:19

Nim is compiling to C. It also supports scripting.

elcritch | karma 3737 | avg karma 1.99 · | 2021-03-06 20:39:46

If you provide a C library then it'll be super easy to add Nim support!

0-_-0 | karma 4231 | avg karma 3.31 · | 2021-08-07 03:41:18

Nim compiles to C, so it can be a drop in replacement.

timClicks | karma 2278 | avg karma 3.13 · | 2015-02-22 21:56:03

FWIW one of the reasons that I have been heavily looking at Nim for the last few weeks is its ease of generating static binaries.

ldlework | karma 156 | avg karma 4.0 · | 2016-02-07 22:11:45

Oh, I've been writing software in Nim pretty happily for a months now. What problems am I blind to?