Ask HN: Why did Nim not catch on like Rust did?

[_448]

I skimmed through Nim website and some code snippets, and see very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc. So why has it not caught on as wild fire like Rust?

Also, what is its FFI story? How easy it is to interop with C++ and JavaScript?

[p-e-w]

Rust had Mozilla's backing, and later other behemoths like Amazon and Microsoft jumped onto the bandwagon.

Corporate support is absolutely essential for a new language to be taken seriously in the industry. If Go weren't associated with Google, people would have laughed that language out of the room long ago. Likewise, it's difficult to imagine TypeScript ever catching on if it didn't have Microsoft's might behind it (even though TypeScript is actually an excellent language).

Without the power of money, you are nothing.

[kristoff_it]

Considering that the Zig Software Foundation not only doesn't have any big corporate backing, but also made an explicit point of always being fully independent, and the fact that we're overall doing fine, I beg to disagree.

https://ziglang.org/zsf/

Big tech wants you to think that you're nothing without them, while in truth there are plenty of situations where small realities can absolutely out-compete them:

https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/

If you want a proxy variable to observe wrt Zig's growth, look at the star history on GitHub: we are today more popular than Rust was at our age.

https://star-history.com/#ziglang/zig&rust-lang/rust&Timelin...

...and in fact some big tech companies are jumping on the bandwagon, like Uber, but that's an after-the-fact thing.

https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...

> If Go weren't associated with Google, people would have laughed that language out of the room long ago.

Nah, Go gets right certain critical things, and that's why is popular. Being from Google doesn't guarantee anything, look at Dart for example.

https://kristoff.it/blog/why-go-and-not-rust/

[Tozen]

While I agree that corporate support plays a huge role with market share and acceptance, I disagree that Go would have been laughed out of the room. Very likely that a language made by Griesemer, Pike, and Thompson would have got lots of attention. Arguably enough to catch on anyway. These men are already famous, in programming circles. Case in point, look at Jai, with just the star power of Jonathan Blow and how well known that it is. In fact, would not bet against just Ken Thompson (by himself), creating a new language and whether or not it would catch on.

[quickthrower2]

The counterexamples are definitely older like Python, Ruby, PHP. JS is a special case.

[tompark]

The main reason IMO:

Nim isn't really known for anything other than being a good general-purpose language. In that sense, it's sorta like Haxe lang.

Other popular languages are T- or M-shaped generalists -- i.e. good enough as a general purpose language but also excelling at 1-3 specialties. You can use these languages for anything but in practice you use them in specific contexts.

* If you're working on a game in Unity3D, you're almost certainly using C#.

* If you're working on ML stuff using Jupyter notebooks, you likely use Python w Pandas etc.

* If you're doing big data processing with Hadoop then it's likely Scala w Spark.

* If you want a very high concurrency messaging backend, then Elixir or Erlang on OTP/BEAM is a good choice.

* If you're making a native iOS app, you don't have to use Swift but you probably will. Same with Kotlin for native Android. If you decide on Flutter instead of native mobile, then you'll use Dart.

However, my boss is never going to make me use Nim, because there aren't any particular use-cases where Nim is known as The Language To Use For That Situation. AFAIK Nim isn't known for any particular libs/frameworks/tools like Django, Rails, numpy/scipy/pandas, PyTorch, Hadoop, OTP, etc.

(full disclosure: I had a hard time finding a good language to replace my Bash scripts and settled on Nimscript, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35756090)

Also *Timing*

Nim came out right after a number of other well-known languages caught on. There are too many other decent and popular languages to choose from. I like Nim, but not a single one of my programmer friends or acquaintances uses it. Whenever I mention it, the reaction is like: "Better to stick with a proven language I know (usually Go/Python/Ruby/Java)" / "Is that like Zig?" / "I'd rather learn Haskell, Rust, or a dependently typed language."

And finally...

I think Mojo is going to hurt Nim adoption.

[forrestthewoods]

This post nails it.

> I think Mojo is going to hurt Nim adoption.

Mojo is interesting. Python is a genuinely terrible language with an unparalleled library ecosystem. I hope something saves me from the tyranny of Python. But I'm not optimistic.

[anta40]

I like Nim, still learning and rewrite some of my personal Java projects in it. Yes, I had same Pascal/Python exposure as well.

Well, agree with "other than being a good general purpose language", Nim doesn't have strong marketing point. Remember many years ago Rails attracted lots of developers to learn Ruby?

Hmm I wonder if Crystal will also share the same fate...

[warangal]

I started using Nim because i wanted to port some of machine learning models written in python with the idea of making them more portable. It was a lot of work as community is relatively small and a new user would end up writing a lot of code.

But Nim has a pretty solid standard library with clearly written code and an awesome community to help with problems. I generally read a lot of standard library code to expand my knowledge of language and discover common patterns which repeat themselves in a lot of real world problems.

C inter-op is really first class, and as far as i know it has one of best C++ inter-op as well, you can take a look at: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE for a real world example.

I use Nim for my work in both professional and personal capacity and also have written about some of it at https://ramanlabs.in/static/blog/index.html

[iopq]

When Rust was able to get rid of a class of memory bugs, undefined behavior, concurrency bugs without a garbage collector, it achieved a breakthrough. You can now write JS or Java VM in a language that doesn't have buffer overflows, dangling pointers and all kinds of other nasty security vulnerabilities.

Nim doesn't GUARANTEE memory safety, so it's basically... better Pascal? It's an iterative improvement that nobody is getting super excited about. Why is it better than D, V, Delphi?

[sph]

There is more to software engineering than just memory safety.

[xigoi]

Nim does guarantee memory safety if you don't use unsafe features like raw pointers.

[c_crank]

Rust doesn't guarantee memory safety.

I think anything that can generate a trivial hello world program that doesn't leak memory is better than V.

[mindwok]

Nim only went 1.0 at the end of 2019, almost 5 years after Rust went 1.0, and my impression is that Nim has a pretty dedicated and healthy user-base as far as newer languages go. I wouldn't write it off yet.

Probably also Rust having a novel memory management model and being backed by a large organisation (Mozilla) had a lot to do with its early success.

[bawolff]

Rust has the elevator pitch down: C but memory safe.

"very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc" is not a good elevator pitch. Its a little bit of everything with no clear focus point.

So I'd say rust had better marketing.

[dijit]

Sorry to be a pedant but it's likely more like: "C++, but memory safe".

[carlmr]

Pitch: Like Python, but faster and multicore.

At least it's the reason I tried it once.

It was not a bad experience.

[xigoi]

How about the motto: “Efficient, Expressive, Elegant”?

[_andrei_]

For me, the pythonic syntax was what made me not want to try it. Of course it's personal preference, but I can't stand anything that uses the indentation level to structure code. I love my curly braces and formatting tools. I imagine I'm not alone in this, so there goes a chunk of people.

[pmontra]

This was a point about 10 years ago, then history settled the matter and people are using Python or not using it mostly because of what they have to do than because of syntax.

I do have a customer using Python. We had our share of bugs introduced by wrong cut and paste or manual git conflict resolutions after merges for code like

  for x in a_list:
    if cond():
      do()
    else:
      other()
    something()

That latter something() was actually outside the loop but got inside and tests didn't caught the error. There is the variant where something() should be inside the loop but got moved outside.

[Tozen]

Have to agree with that point. Significant numbers of people would not give it chance, based on that reason alone.

There is possibly another argument to be made, that Nim is not close enough to Python. Look at how people have gravitated towards Mojo and it being a superset. Therefore, Nim could be argued as kind of trapped in a no man's land, where not of the C family and not close enough to Python to be an easy enough switch over nor strong enough to gain mass appeal with its own identity.

[yakubin]

Same here. Similarly, I stay away from macros. I think they have a detrimental effect on Rust’s development as well, where sometimes proposals of semantic features are rejected, because something can be done with macros on the syntax level. Maybe it can, but each time it’s inferior. So not only does a user need to deal with macros written by others, but some things aren’t going to get macro-less solutions and the user is forced to write macros from time to time as well (if there isn’t a crate with them ready). And don’t even get me started on the effect of proc macros on compilation times.

[xigoi]

For me it's the exact opposite. Rust's use of unnecessary punctuation and less-than/greater-than signs as brackets is one of the things that makes me not like it.

[foul]

I use Nim rarely exactly for this reason. I dream of a transpiler. I would totally be the clown who would transpile to Nim which may be transpiled to C.

[ww520]

That’s a very good observation.

[kristoff_it]

The answer probably lies in non-technical things, like marketing, community building and governance.

The language not having one clear thing it excels at, surely makes marketing it more difficult, so Nim would have needed more effort than normal to properly explain its philosophy to the market.

Community building and governance is also critical. Nim has a fork called Nimskull that was created because of disagreements in the core team. I don't have any insight on what happened there, but regardless having part of your core team splinter off into a separate hard fork is not good for the growth of the project. This is a HN thread from that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32021299

Lastly, it's also a matter of luck. Sometimes you just happen to be working on something that becomes more relevant all of a sudden in a way that you couldn't predict, and some other times this doesn't happen. Zig for example became more relevant once M1 Macs came out because now all of a sudden arm64 is not a "theoretical" target anymore. Now the laptop that you want to use is arm, and so cross-compilation suddenly becomes a real thing to worry about.

[pietroppeter]

> The answer probably lies in non-technical things, like marketing, community building and governance.

> The language not having one clear thing it excels at, surely makes marketing it more difficult, so Nim would have needed more effort than normal to properly explain its philosophy to the market.

Agree on both points! And I am starting to realize that governance is the key element. A better governance would enable better community building and with a big community and a decent governance someone good enough at marketing would be able to figure out a way to put in the additional effort. But hey guys, where can you find a tech community in which we are all pretty bad at marketing and very bad at evangelizing? I think it is a nice value proposition for those who like to build stuff… ;)

I think contributors should focus first on building compelling cases of using Nim in specific niches (like jmgomez is doing for unreal engine) and we should at some point try to meet and start working on the governance issues. It will take some time but I am still confident. The language is such a joy and the community - albeit small - is full of outstanding people.

Btw, you have done outstanding work on zig, congratulations to you, Andrew and the rest of the community, it is inspiring to see! I find very interesting how you decentralize community management empowering people to build their own communities. At least that is what I gather from following from far, I might be off. Would love to know more if that was an explicit goal or the result of some happy coincidences.

[WiSaGaN]

You need a killer feature to gain ground on those traditional, well-established languages in the industry. Only marginally better is not enough for people to invest so much as to introduce a new language in a serious company. This killer feature needs to provide really clear advantage so that a risk-benefit analysis can show that even introduce this new language is a significant undertaking, it is still worth it. For Rust, this killer feature is memory safety comparing to other bare metal high performance languages like C and C++. For comparison, D is a decent improvement to C++, but it is still not enough for people to switch in large scale in the industry, because it does not have that killer feature to stand out.

[theshrike79]

Basically a language needs something I can use to sell it to other people in the organisation.

I can't just cowboy stuff with $language because other people would need to maintain it.

C# is the de facto language for Unity-based software.

With Go I can cross-compile a single executable blob and distribute that easily to a heterogenous environment. It also does concurrency _really_ well.

Python is the one that the data analysts know how to use

Rust is for those cases where none of the above are fast enough or memory efficiency is a big thing.

What does Nim do?

[winrid]

The IDE story isn't good yet. That's the main reason, IMO. The VSCode extension is usable but I wouldn't call it great or want to depend on it for a large project.

Also, concurrency is very confusing in Nim. Channels require copying, so you start to look elsewhere. Regular stuff like thread pools and async fit together in confusing ways and it's easy to create multithreaded code that compiles but does not work. It's common to look into a nim "web framework" and have no idea how concurrency works in the framework from the docs or the code. There is one nim HTTP library that does, but I don't think it's very popular.

[elcritch]

I think Nim is a bit younger, and took a while to find it's core features. It also now has better support for multithreading with arc/orc. It has a chance at slow and steady growth. It's maybe not the best at anything though it is well rounded, but mainlyfor me brings back a joy in programming.

Nim has excellent C++ FFI. It's not perfect, but capable of wrapping C++ templates, calling constructors, and virtual methods. Though it can be a pain dealing with inner template types and consts. Here's a larger example of C++ interfacing with Unreal Engine: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE

[pull_my_finger]

I think instances where transpiled languages becoming more popular than their targets would be the exception not the rule. At the end of the day, you generally are advised to be proficient in the target language to use the transpiled language skillfully or to be able to effectively debug it, and if you're already proficient in the target language, you likely can just write the target language directly and have cleaner/faster/optimal output.

Typescript would be the notable "exception", and even that had huge backing, and I'd still have a hard time believing even typescript has really surpassed javascript in usage.

[xigoi]

Nim is not transpiled, and you don't need to know any C to effectively use Nim.

[signaru]

Personally, I don't like "style insensitivity". And it's easy to find others complaining about this feature.

[xigoi]

Then just ignore it. As long as you don't want to do something crazy, you don't even need to know that the feature exists.

[FL33TW00D]

Who is Nim striving to replace? Rust was very clear - an order of magnitude improvement over C++.

It's the same with Julia, yes it was clear who it was trying to replace, but it wasn't 10x better.

[danielscrubs]

Rust had a fresh take with borrowing and had backing for years.

Rust also stroke a programmers thirst for learning new concepts (or ego).

It’s basically good vs interesting.

[inawarminister]

In my opinion, Nim is too broad. I did some code in Nim to extend/make Python ML (Huggingface) faster and Nimpy was very good. Then I tried to learn how to use Nim for systems programming and barely any guide exist except for open-source libraries.

In my opinion, Nim's ability to be compiled to C, C++, and JS make materials for new users too defragmented (this also almost occur with Clojure, IMO, though JVM/JS/and now Dart targeting make sense with their various niches). And all the tricky parts like Orc/Arc/no GC.

But I really love the Python + Pascal syntax, to be honest. Maybe even more than Lisps.

I really wish I could buy the new Nim book but it's kinda hard as a 3rd worlder to import dead-tree books. Unfortunate.

[joshka]

In answering this, I'd look beyond just the language features and look at the background of how it caught on. What apps were built first. When did the "Rewrite it in rust" mantra take hold. What impact did <system tool> but with colors / nice cli / sensible defaults have on things (e.g. fd / exa / lsd / bat / ...)? What libraries being available made it easy (clap / argh)?

Then look at how the community was built (e.g. Mozilla / conferences / forums etc.)

I've only recently started writing rust (after years of C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and a variety of other languages), and once I got past the basics of understanding borrow checker issues I love it as a language. Personally (for reasons unknown) I prefer brackets over indentation based languages, so Nim is a pretty hard sell there.

[cb321]

I don't know about all your other questions, and I realize your post was more about "why Rust?" rather than "why not Nim?", but that said the https://github.com/c-blake/cligen Nim CLI framework seems much lower effort / ceremony than even Rust's `argh` and is just about as old as `clap` (both cligen & clap started 8 years ago in 2015 - Rust argh is much newer).

There are over 50 CLI utilities in Nim at https://github.com/c-blake/bu, many of which do something novel rather than just "re-doing ls/find/cat with a twist". While they are really more "ls/ps construction toolkits" with some default configs to get people going, I think https://github.com/c-blake/lc and https://github.com/c-blake/procs are nicer than Rust alternatives. I mention these since you seem interested in such tools.

[antifa]

I think if nim supported rust as a backend, with usable support for crates, that would be a new killer feature.

[mattdw]

I've only played with Nim a little, but I found it really compelling and honestly quite fun to write. It's quite elegant and economical and the performance is impressive for the lack of ceremony.

However, the language itself still seems to be a little in flux (v2.0 is nearly out, and my impression is that v3.0 might finally be a nice stable language) and the BDFL makes some language decisions (and holds some opinions) that I'm not fully on board with, and I think make the language a little less than it could be. Obviously that's subjective though.

I'll definitely keep an eye on it and check back in periodically, but I'm also not going to write any non-disposable code in it for now.

[prirun]

IMO, if Nim's goal had been a compiled Python, with restrictions where necessary to ensure this was possible (can't add class members at runtime for example), it would be much more popular. I don't mean you could take Python code and compile it, but where design decisions needed to be made, they could have been more compatible with Python instead of choosing the "Nim's not Python so let's use a unique syntax or incompatible semantics" path.

They also need a new BDFL with some tact.

[the__alchemist]

Rust belongs to a small collection of languages that can run code with minimal latency, and on hardware directly, ie without an OS. (Others are C, C++, Zig, and ADA).

Rust can be argued to be a nice addition to the group. You can view it as "The nicest (in some qualities) in a niche". Nim doesn't have this sort of edge.

[cb321]

Niceness is subjective, but Nim is just as valid an addition to that group. Nim compiles to C and has had an --os=standalone mode for like 10 years from its git history, and as mentioned else-thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506087) can be used for Linux kernel modules. Multiple people have written "stub OSes" in it (https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel & further along https://github.com/khaledh/axiom).

While it can use clang as a backend, Nim does not rely upon LLVM support like Zig or Rust (pre-gcc-rust working). Use on embedded devices is fairly popular: https://forum.nim-lang.org/search?q=embedded (or web search).

Latency-wise, for a time, video game programming was a perceived "adoption niche" or maybe "hook" for Nim and games often have stringent frame rendering deadlines. If you are interested in video games, you might appreciate https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy which covers all but Ada in your list with Nim being fastest (on one CPU/version/compiler/etc). Note, however, that cross-PL comparisons are often done by those with much "porting energy" but limited familiarity with any but a few of the PLs. A better way to view it is that "Nim responds well to optimization effort" (like C/Ada/C++/Rust/Zig).

[0atman]

Nim is too timid. Most languages are too timid.

My context: I'm a maintainer of iNim, creator of the Rust channel, No Boilerplate, and a professional python web developer for 15 years.

The features you are excited about in Nim are compromised for the sake of simplicity:

- Macros can't change syntax,

- There's a limit to how real-time the standard language is,

- Compiling to javascript is a nice trick, but if it didn't rely on GC it could compile to webassembly, which is better,

- Ask any advanced python developer: Indentation for syntax is a bad idea at scale. Hell, have you ever used YAML?

What Rust does is a revolution because they solved the problem of memory safety without garbage collection with the Borrow Checker. The knock-on effects are GARGANTUAN.

This was a hard problem to solve, and it makes the language more complex to learn, but it unlocks all the language's superpowers. If you 'cheat' with a GC, you get nothing. Nim started its life, just as most languages did with a GC, and the efforts to keep the syntax the same while offering alternatives are greatly compromised. It's far easier to add GC/RC to a low-level language than it is to remove it from a high-level one, where the whole ecosystem relies upon this behvaviour.

Of COURSE I know about Nim's plugabble GC options. That doesn't impress me at all (though Araq's effort is to be commended). In Nim they are compiler options, in Rust they're libraries. The difference is vital. For example, at a per-variable level, I can choose to reference count with https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/struct.Arc.html if I so wish (I rarely need to because the borrow checker is magic).

If you want python, you can have it inside a Rust macro, sort of like this https://crates.io/crates/inline-python because rust macros CAN change syntax. With Macros and no GC, you can rebuild ANY FEATURE inside Rust, the floor of the abstraction is the metal, and the ceiling is the sky.

This is what Rust is all about: full power to the developer, no compromises. My video on this topic for those interested is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuMXWc0xrK0

I love both languages, but I can only see one language being the standard next 40 years, and demonstrably so can Linux, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Discord, and many others.

[c_crank]

Rust people talking about 'revolutions' love to ignore that memory safe languages without garbage collectors have been around for years. Ada+Spark, Cyclone, even D all made large steps forward in this area long before Rust was ever a thing.

[xigoi]

The problem with WebAssembly isn't that Nim couldn't compile to it (which it can), but that WebAssembly can't do anything without JavaScript.

[364758483]

I couldn't get past the case insensitivity.

[theshrike79]

If someone asked me to describe what Nim is and what it's good at without looking at their promotional materials I couldn't tell you.

Even though I have never used Rust in any significant capacity (tried to do Advent of Code with it, gave up on the first task) I can still tell you what Rust is good at.

I can do the same for C, C++, Java/Typescript, Go, C#, Java etc.

[amir734jj]

Because language is one thing and community is another thing. I have the same feeling about Crystal.

[theshrike79]

I have no idea what Crystal is either :D

[frou_dh]

I had the impression that Nim was a bit lower status amongst compiled languages because it wasn't a full compiler. It just outputted C code. Not sure if that's still the case.

[crim4]

it was not suitable for real-time systems few years ago, they undefaulted the gc few patches ago (in favor of orc), however even using the same rust's memory management, you're gonna have 100% of the heap objects to be traced; rust ownership model allows you to avoid tracing (such as arc) when they are not strictly necessary. that said i really don't like rust and all its approaches, i strictly recommend to have a look at nim;

[scotty79]

Rust has a specific enemy/friend. The borrow checker. People wanna check out what is that legendary beast. Nim is just a reasonable and "bag of assorted stuff" language, like Python.

[revskill]

Indentation sensitivity is ugly.

With a bracket, i can easily read the scopes, block of codes. With indentation, it's harder.

[frodowtf]

So... you don't indent your bracket blocks?

[Shish2k]

For me: because rust installed correctly the first time, and rustup keeps it up to date correctly. Compared to Nim, where I tried three different installers, and all of them were broken in different ways; eventually I got one installer to work, but then I tried updating, and it stopped working…

It’s a pretty nice language when the tools work though :)

[ipaddr]

Poor name and no major backing