[carterza]

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.

[Tiberium]

> many of the more senior community members or those who have been around for a bit have migrated there

It's true that compiler developers like krux, Clyybber, saem migrated to nimskull, I don't disagree.

> but there are only a handful of folks remaining that have been around for more than a year or two

But I totally disagree with your false statements about "senior" community members (those who don't do compiler development) migrating to nimskull - this is not true at all. There are a lot of "senior" people left in the Nim community.

And again, nimskull isn't a "silver bullet" either. It has the flexibility to change major things in the language just because it's a hard fork and almost no one (except people who develop it) uses it for real projects, whereas Nim has an actual userbase that doesn't want their code to be broken, especially considering the fact that nimskull has already removed a lot of the stdlib libraries, especially async (which there is no alternative to in Nimskull).

[PMunch]

Most of the "senior" community members who have migrated to NimSkull are those who liked to work on the compiler. The ones who remains using Nim are those who like to write libraries and projects. I've yet to see anyone create a library or project with NimSkull, although that might be because I'm not too exposed to it. I would love to be proven wrong, but for the time being NimSkull looks like a good idea if they can pull it off. But currently it looks like ripping of the band-aid to get to a better place and currently it's still in the burning and stinging phase before things (hopefully) gets better.

[carterza]

I guess your definition of senior and mine vary. I'd consider senior members anyone willing to work on the compiler, as they are the members with the potential to move the language forward and out of the mess it currently finds itself in.

Are there experienced programmers in the Nim community, sure? Are they able to fix Nim with Nim's leadership in place? Doubtful in my mind based on history.

Also, I apologize if it seemed like I was evangelizing Nimskull or suggesting folks switch to it. I agree it is in no shape to serve a replacement for Nim presently, and may not ever be.

[HiddenBek]

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.

[carterza]

The compiler works until you stress the type system or try to take advantage of features that are experimental and then stay that way forever. How many iterations of concepts have we been through at this point? What happened to hot code reloading? Why do we have all these legacy GCs?

The point is the compiler has more and more cruft that makes it increasingly more complex and increasingly unreliable. It also makes it so that bugs are harder and harder to fix. Not to mention that it's basically impossible to track what is going on with the language at any given point in time because there is no roadmap or updated status. It also doesn't help that certain folks like to create ten GitHub issues and RFCs for every perceived slight in the language.

Once again, the problem boils down to a complete lack of leadership or interest in running the show - and instead of empowering the community to make that happen, leadership sits back and acts like everything is great and perfect and pats themselves on the back. When someone complains that it is not, leadership finds a way to defend itself and turn sentiment against the person complaining. It happens over and over again and it's why Nim isn't a success story like languages that actually have empowered communities and leaders that are interested in leading and not just collecting book revenues / making .io games, etc... while actively gatekeeping those who would like to get involved in making things better.

[SolitudeSF]

its true that leadership does nothing and development is stuck, but even in this state nim is probably enough for most people.

> how much frustration you will encounter fighting the compiler and broken / under-specified language features and semantics might be a turn-off.

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

> My advice would be to look elsewhere.

that would imply that there is a better alternative

[lqdev]

> 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 [2]: https://github.com/liquidev/aglet

[carterza]

I'm not sure there is one - but I guess a language where you're not constantly dealing with horrible error message, an under-specified and broken implementation and a shitty stdlib - might be better, even if it doesn't have some of the nicer frills of Nim.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Ye gods and little fishes, is there a new-ish language suitable for application programming, which has a more-or-less feature-complete design and implementation, and where there's no petty drama going on every other day? And which, to boot, lets you get a job done without requiring/strongly suggesting that you become a part of their vibrant community?

A have a sinking feeling such language exists and is called "C".

[carterza]

You may be right... I wouldn't call Nim's community vibrant though.

[kanonieer]

This matches my experience with Nim community and it's toxic leadership. The amount of petty drama the community leaders get involved with is unbelievable. Spending a few weeks on their Discord, and observing how the leadership interacts with new/opposing ideas is enough to get a clear picture. It doesn't inspire trust.

Contrast this to, say, Zig, their road-maps and community structure is light years ahead.

[planetis]

What the heck man? This doesn't match my experience at all. And I can't find your username on neither matrix nor discord. Did you just found a chance for a sucker punch and took it? I bet Zig is the wonder land.