Lots of small language-level improvements, but there don’t seem to be that many fundamental compiler architecture issues mentioned in the changelog. I may be missing those since I haven’t used Nim for a long time, but I assume if the compiler was made 10x less janky they would’ve at least had a footnote about it. (For context, I’ve used Nim as my main language in 2019-2020.)
I don’t like that there still isn’t my #1 most awaited feature - incremental compilation. Nim isn’t a very fast language to compile and the slowness really showed with some of my projects. In particular rapid, my game engine, suffered from pretty terrible compile times, which made building games with it really difficult.
And I wonder how much generics jank is still present in 2.0. And I wonder when they’ll make generics into proper generics rather than C++-like templates. The error messages with those can get pretty abysmal and can appear out of nowhere. Like here. This particular cryptic error has appeared so many times while I was developing my game that I just gave up on the project eventually.
In addition to that I’m not a fan of how lame the module system is. Having used/seen module systems from other languages, eg. Rust or Go, Nim’s compiler not having a clue about the concept of packages feels pretty ancient. This particularly shows when you’re developing libraries made out of many small modules; the only way to typecheck such a library in its entirety is to create a library.nim file and import everything there. Text editors didn’t seem to understand that back in the 1.4 days and would regularly miss type errors that occurred when analyzing the library as a whole.
Oh, and the text editor situation… Nim’s compiler does not have incremental recompilation, so the autocomplete gets slower the larger your project is. And it can get really slow for even pretty small projects (~10k SLOC.)
And don’t get me started on the dialects. Endless --define switches and experimental features. And none of it is implemented in a robust way. Anyone can break your library by globally enabling a --define you did not anticipate. And the --defines are not even documented in one place.
So sad to see Nim’s leadership pursuing syntax sugar and small convenience features instead of fixing foundational problems. Really wish they had a more forward-looking vision for the project and its community, rather than focusing on fulfilling the main developer’s wishes and experiments.
The Nim leadership is the main developer, Andreas. He’s not interested in sharing responsibility or broadening the leadership, as he vehemently expressed a month ago:
I lost all interest in setting up a foundation because I lost faith in mankind. Every day I wake up in this clownworld where people replaced the “master” branch with “main”, sending a strong message “fuck you” to everybody who is older than 50 and has a hard time to change old habits.
Here is a hint: If you are obsessed with racism and sexism it’s because you’re a racist and sexist.
That was the point where I gave up on Nim. I don’t know where to start with this — it’s laughable that he pulls out that silly fight about master/main as his breaking point; he whines about society changing and it’s their fault he might have to “change old habits”, and that tired canard about racism/sexism. (He also appears to have deleted the comments objecting to his post, though not the supportive ones. Because of course he’s the forum moderator too.)
But my main takeaway is that the guy’s even more of an asshat than I previously thought, and he’s going to remain the gatekeeper to any change in Nim, and main source of truth on the forum. I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’d rather fight with a borrow-checker.
I’ve seen his comment, yeah. It’s informative and unfortunate.
I’ve honestly been tempted to write a “why not Nim” blog post for a couple years now but never got around to doing so because a) I don’t like spreading negativity, and b) I’d rather not attract publicity to a project whose success I don’t exactly believe in.
Bad opinions aside, I believe Araq’s lack of care for the community is precisely the reason why the project is going in the wrong direction. I’ve heard horror stories from former compiler contributors about how hard to maintain the code is and how much it lacks documentation. No wonder it doesn’t attract very many outside contributions. Had he cared more for having other people work on the language alongside him, maybe things would have turned out different, but alas…
This sort of dictatorship is not the sort of leadership of a project I’d like to invest my time in. I much prefer the Rust RFC process over this.
Woah, I didn’t expect so much negativity in this thread… I was kind hoping to see some interesting discussions and maybe even some praises for a language that reached its 2.0.0 milestone without the backing of any tech giant.
Sure, the language is probably still not perfect, and at least some of @liquidev’s remarks make sense… but it is a remarkable milestone nonetheless.
I have been using Nim for years mostly on my personal projects (I kinda built my own ecosystem on top of it), and I must say it is fun to use. And it is very well documented. Unfortunately it feels very much a fringe language because it didn’t see massive corporate adoption (yet) but I hope this can change sooner or later.
About Araq: the guy can be rude at times, maybe even borderline unprofessional in some of his replies but he did put a lot of energy into the project over the years, and I am grateful for that. I tend not to get too involved in politics or heated debates… I saw that reply and it struck me as “a bit odd” and definitely not good marketing for the language and the community. I just hope that doesn’t drive too many people away from the language; it would be a pity.
that doesn’t drive too many people away from the language
Well it’s one thing to wish for some features, it’s another to wish for a leadership that doesn’t have a personal mental breakdown in the official forums - attacking a multitude of people - and deletes any critical response. The second one can’t just be ignored.
And if rust is already struggling with compile times, I wonder how bad this is with something that doesn’t even know about incremental compilation. You can’t just ignore a debugging round-trip time of minutes.
You can ask people for being less negative or strict, but first: don’t forget it’s v2.0 and second: the other way of not complaining about real production problems is to say nothing and move on.
I’m sorry if my comment came off as rude or overly negative… I don’t mean to ruin the celebration; as a long time user I’m just trying to voice my concerns about the direction the language is taking, and I think it’s important to talk about these rather than keep quiet about them forever and instead create an atmosphere of toxic positivity. 2.0 is considered by many a huge milestone and seeing important issues which put me off from using the language not be addressed in a major version is pretty disappointing.
Perhaps this speaks of our expectations of major versions; I see them as something that should be pretty big while in real life often it’s just some small but breaking changes. I’m of the firm belief that perhaps Nim went into 1.0 too early for its own good, because inevitably there will be breaking changes (and with how unstable the compiler can be, there can be breakages even across minor versions.)
I’ll be this person and ask you why you don’t come to D? There is a fundation and the tone is very respectful.
It is a main inspiration for Nim, actually Araq spent many years reading and commenting on the D forums. D pioneered many things that went into Nim, but the core language is very stable and there is no compiler switch explosion. In many ways D is more further along than Nim with its 3 compilers and it supports internal controversy and I’d say sane debate inside its community. I do see a bit of FUD about D on the internet, often by echo’ing a single negative opinion in a majority of content programmers. Sometimes I think it’s down to syntax (Python-like vs C-like).
Agree. I also use D and have since… looks at personal repos… 2014 or 2015 but maybe earlier and started doing some toys in Nim around 2018. What D lacks is buzz. It’s mature, stable, and performant and, at least for me, doesn’t break between upgrades. Some corners of D like CTE and nested templates I find hard to debug (and this is true for other languages, but that’s not a free pass) but they work. I keep finding bits of Nim and core/former-core libraries where that’s not the case and they fail in odd ways and that’s still true in 2.0.
As bizarre as that is, Araq’s use of the phrase “clown world” is more indicative of future behaviour than random Rust community members talking about pronouns. Here’s another strange Araq post - I wouldn’t want to support a project with this kind of world view.
Maybe also because that analogy argument was inside one issue, opened specifically to bikeshed it. The other one felt more like a dismissal of anything that isn’t in his view of the world - in a discussion about giving the community a chance to steer the direction of the language.
I’d happily take that over Araq’s bullshit, like when I pointed out that Nim’s null-checking was leading to bogus errors in a bunch of my code (after hours of debugging and creating a reduced test case) he dismissed it with “that’s because the control flow analysis doesn’t notice ‘return’ statements, and you shouldn’t be using return because it isn’t in Pascal.” Despite him having put both features in the language.
Oh? I recall similar arguments being used against Jews.
It’s a fairly obvious logic fallacy, which anyone smart enough to be a programmer ought to see through pretty easily. (Hint: if you deny a > b, it does not follow you believe b > a.)
He also appears to have deleted the comments objecting to his post
Although I agree with almost all of your points and came to the same conclusion, I think it’s fair to say that not all critical comments were deleted. There are several in the thread that you linked.
The comments do show that at least one comment was removed. I don’t know if there were more now-removed comments because I read the thread only a while after it was closed.
After trying Nim for a little while some time ago, the module system is what soured me on the language. I don’t like that you can’t tell where a symbol comes from by looking at the source of the current file. It’s “clever” in that you automatically get things like the right $ function for whatever types get imported by your imports, but that’s less valuable than explicitness.
On the contrary, I actually don’t hold much grudge against the import system’s use of the global namespace. Static typing and procedure overloading ensures you get to call the procedure you wanted, and I’ve rarely had any ambiguity problems (and then the compiler gives you an error which you can resolve by explicitly qualifying the symbol.) While coding Rust, I almost never look at where a symbol comes from because I have the IDE for browsing code and can Ctrl+Click on the relevant thing to look at its sources.
My main grudge is that the module system has no concept of a package or main file, which would hugely simplify the logic that’s needed to discover a library’s main source file and run nim check on it. Right now text editors need to employ heuristics to discover which file should be nim check’d, which is arguably not ideal in a world where developers typically intend just a single main file.
Political arguments aside, I really like having a strongly typed compiled language that is imperative which enables me to make programs easily. I also like the fact that we don’t have a lot of the metadata and holy wars that have become so much a part of culture these days. I kind of miss the times when we could just have a technical discussion without politics and emotions. Entering into the fray. Emotions are fine but they shouldn’t be the point where the only emotions that I have is outrage and anger. I miss the age of wonderment like having wonderment in a technology. And while I may not agree it with everything that the author espouses I can recognize an interesting technical achievement when I see it. Nim is very approachable, and the transpiling really lets me do very interesting things. I’m a big fan. I don’t have to worry about which version I’m using or having to do a bunch of stuff with like 7000 versions of python. As a user I really like nim.
I like the look of Nim and even got a book about it, but I’ve never had a project where I’ve been able to use it. It probably doesn’t help that nobody at $work is interested in it, and I don’t get much development done outside of work.
Perhaps I should try to use it for the next Advent of Code instead of the trusty old Python, although it doesn’t mimic real world scenarios that well.
Hollywood level story. Bad BDFL doing his language vs. good committees doing theirs languages (if you know what I mean). Of course rooting for the villain, otherwise there will be no sequel.
Lots of small language-level improvements, but there don’t seem to be that many fundamental compiler architecture issues mentioned in the changelog. I may be missing those since I haven’t used Nim for a long time, but I assume if the compiler was made 10x less janky they would’ve at least had a footnote about it. (For context, I’ve used Nim as my main language in 2019-2020.)
I don’t like that there still isn’t my #1 most awaited feature - incremental compilation. Nim isn’t a very fast language to compile and the slowness really showed with some of my projects. In particular rapid, my game engine, suffered from pretty terrible compile times, which made building games with it really difficult.
And I wonder how much generics jank is still present in 2.0. And I wonder when they’ll make generics into proper generics rather than C++-like templates. The error messages with those can get pretty abysmal and can appear out of nowhere. Like here. This particular cryptic error has appeared so many times while I was developing my game that I just gave up on the project eventually.
In addition to that I’m not a fan of how lame the module system is. Having used/seen module systems from other languages, eg. Rust or Go, Nim’s compiler not having a clue about the concept of packages feels pretty ancient. This particularly shows when you’re developing libraries made out of many small modules; the only way to typecheck such a library in its entirety is to create a
library.nimfile and import everything there. Text editors didn’t seem to understand that back in the 1.4 days and would regularly miss type errors that occurred when analyzing the library as a whole.Oh, and the text editor situation… Nim’s compiler does not have incremental recompilation, so the autocomplete gets slower the larger your project is. And it can get really slow for even pretty small projects (~10k SLOC.)
And don’t get me started on the dialects. Endless
--defineswitches andexperimentalfeatures. And none of it is implemented in a robust way. Anyone can break your library by globally enabling a--defineyou did not anticipate. And the--defines are not even documented in one place.So sad to see Nim’s leadership pursuing syntax sugar and small convenience features instead of fixing foundational problems. Really wish they had a more forward-looking vision for the project and its community, rather than focusing on fulfilling the main developer’s wishes and experiments.
The Nim leadership is the main developer, Andreas. He’s not interested in sharing responsibility or broadening the leadership, as he vehemently expressed a month ago:
That was the point where I gave up on Nim. I don’t know where to start with this — it’s laughable that he pulls out that silly fight about master/main as his breaking point; he whines about society changing and it’s their fault he might have to “change old habits”, and that tired canard about racism/sexism. (He also appears to have deleted the comments objecting to his post, though not the supportive ones. Because of course he’s the forum moderator too.)
But my main takeaway is that the guy’s even more of an asshat than I previously thought, and he’s going to remain the gatekeeper to any change in Nim, and main source of truth on the forum. I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’d rather fight with a borrow-checker.
I’ve seen his comment, yeah. It’s informative and unfortunate.
I’ve honestly been tempted to write a “why not Nim” blog post for a couple years now but never got around to doing so because a) I don’t like spreading negativity, and b) I’d rather not attract publicity to a project whose success I don’t exactly believe in.
Bad opinions aside, I believe Araq’s lack of care for the community is precisely the reason why the project is going in the wrong direction. I’ve heard horror stories from former compiler contributors about how hard to maintain the code is and how much it lacks documentation. No wonder it doesn’t attract very many outside contributions. Had he cared more for having other people work on the language alongside him, maybe things would have turned out different, but alas…
This sort of dictatorship is not the sort of leadership of a project I’d like to invest my time in. I much prefer the Rust RFC process over this.
Woah, I didn’t expect so much negativity in this thread… I was kind hoping to see some interesting discussions and maybe even some praises for a language that reached its 2.0.0 milestone without the backing of any tech giant.
Sure, the language is probably still not perfect, and at least some of @liquidev’s remarks make sense… but it is a remarkable milestone nonetheless.
I have been using Nim for years mostly on my personal projects (I kinda built my own ecosystem on top of it), and I must say it is fun to use. And it is very well documented. Unfortunately it feels very much a fringe language because it didn’t see massive corporate adoption (yet) but I hope this can change sooner or later.
About Araq: the guy can be rude at times, maybe even borderline unprofessional in some of his replies but he did put a lot of energy into the project over the years, and I am grateful for that. I tend not to get too involved in politics or heated debates… I saw that reply and it struck me as “a bit odd” and definitely not good marketing for the language and the community. I just hope that doesn’t drive too many people away from the language; it would be a pity.
Well it’s one thing to wish for some features, it’s another to wish for a leadership that doesn’t have a personal mental breakdown in the official forums - attacking a multitude of people - and deletes any critical response. The second one can’t just be ignored.
And if rust is already struggling with compile times, I wonder how bad this is with something that doesn’t even know about incremental compilation. You can’t just ignore a debugging round-trip time of minutes.
You can ask people for being less negative or strict, but first: don’t forget it’s v2.0 and second: the other way of not complaining about real production problems is to say nothing and move on.
I’m sorry if my comment came off as rude or overly negative… I don’t mean to ruin the celebration; as a long time user I’m just trying to voice my concerns about the direction the language is taking, and I think it’s important to talk about these rather than keep quiet about them forever and instead create an atmosphere of toxic positivity. 2.0 is considered by many a huge milestone and seeing important issues which put me off from using the language not be addressed in a major version is pretty disappointing.
Perhaps this speaks of our expectations of major versions; I see them as something that should be pretty big while in real life often it’s just some small but breaking changes. I’m of the firm belief that perhaps Nim went into 1.0 too early for its own good, because inevitably there will be breaking changes (and with how unstable the compiler can be, there can be breakages even across minor versions.)
I’ll be this person and ask you why you don’t come to D? There is a fundation and the tone is very respectful. It is a main inspiration for Nim, actually Araq spent many years reading and commenting on the D forums. D pioneered many things that went into Nim, but the core language is very stable and there is no compiler switch explosion. In many ways D is more further along than Nim with its 3 compilers and it supports internal controversy and I’d say sane debate inside its community. I do see a bit of FUD about D on the internet, often by echo’ing a single negative opinion in a majority of content programmers. Sometimes I think it’s down to syntax (Python-like vs C-like).
Agree. I also use D and have since… looks at personal repos… 2014 or 2015 but maybe earlier and started doing some toys in Nim around 2018. What D lacks is buzz. It’s mature, stable, and performant and, at least for me, doesn’t break between upgrades. Some corners of D like CTE and nested templates I find hard to debug (and this is true for other languages, but that’s not a free pass) but they work. I keep finding bits of Nim and core/former-core libraries where that’s not the case and they fail in odd ways and that’s still true in 2.0.
I actually have a book on D that I got years ago. I’d forgotten about it.
Is the compiler still proprietary?
DMD backend was the only bit proprietary and that’s not the case anymore since years.
After seeing the Rust community extensively argue about the gender of philosophers in a silly analogy, I’m glad that Nim has a leader who is explicitly against such bullshit.
As bizarre as that is, Araq’s use of the phrase “clown world” is more indicative of future behaviour than random Rust community members talking about pronouns. Here’s another strange Araq post - I wouldn’t want to support a project with this kind of world view.
Look carefully at the date of the post you linked…
April Fool’s was an opportunity to make a joke, but the content of the so-called joke is all Araq.
Maybe also because that analogy argument was inside one issue, opened specifically to bikeshed it. The other one felt more like a dismissal of anything that isn’t in his view of the world - in a discussion about giving the community a chance to steer the direction of the language.
I’d happily take that over Araq’s bullshit, like when I pointed out that Nim’s null-checking was leading to bogus errors in a bunch of my code (after hours of debugging and creating a reduced test case) he dismissed it with “that’s because the control flow analysis doesn’t notice ‘return’ statements, and you shouldn’t be using return because it isn’t in Pascal.” Despite him having put both features in the language.
All else aside, I think there’s truth in this statement.
With enough sophistry any statement can be considered true.
Oh? I recall similar arguments being used against Jews.
It’s a fairly obvious logic fallacy, which anyone smart enough to be a programmer ought to see through pretty easily. (Hint: if you deny
a > b, it does not follow you believeb > a.)Although I agree with almost all of your points and came to the same conclusion, I think it’s fair to say that not all critical comments were deleted. There are several in the thread that you linked.
The comments do show that at least one comment was removed. I don’t know if there were more now-removed comments because I read the thread only a while after it was closed.
After trying Nim for a little while some time ago, the module system is what soured me on the language. I don’t like that you can’t tell where a symbol comes from by looking at the source of the current file. It’s “clever” in that you automatically get things like the right
$function for whatever types get imported by your imports, but that’s less valuable than explicitness.On the contrary, I actually don’t hold much grudge against the import system’s use of the global namespace. Static typing and procedure overloading ensures you get to call the procedure you wanted, and I’ve rarely had any ambiguity problems (and then the compiler gives you an error which you can resolve by explicitly qualifying the symbol.) While coding Rust, I almost never look at where a symbol comes from because I have the IDE for browsing code and can Ctrl+Click on the relevant thing to look at its sources.
My main grudge is that the module system has no concept of a package or main file, which would hugely simplify the logic that’s needed to discover a library’s main source file and run
nim checkon it. Right now text editors need to employ heuristics to discover which file should benim check’d, which is arguably not ideal in a world where developers typically intend just a single main file.Political arguments aside, I really like having a strongly typed compiled language that is imperative which enables me to make programs easily. I also like the fact that we don’t have a lot of the metadata and holy wars that have become so much a part of culture these days. I kind of miss the times when we could just have a technical discussion without politics and emotions. Entering into the fray. Emotions are fine but they shouldn’t be the point where the only emotions that I have is outrage and anger. I miss the age of wonderment like having wonderment in a technology. And while I may not agree it with everything that the author espouses I can recognize an interesting technical achievement when I see it. Nim is very approachable, and the transpiling really lets me do very interesting things. I’m a big fan. I don’t have to worry about which version I’m using or having to do a bunch of stuff with like 7000 versions of python. As a user I really like nim.
I like the look of Nim and even got a book about it, but I’ve never had a project where I’ve been able to use it. It probably doesn’t help that nobody at $work is interested in it, and I don’t get much development done outside of work.
Perhaps I should try to use it for the next Advent of Code instead of the trusty old Python, although it doesn’t mimic real world scenarios that well.
This is good, congrats on the release!
Hollywood level story. Bad BDFL doing his language vs. good committees doing theirs languages (if you know what I mean). Of course rooting for the villain, otherwise there will be no sequel.