Conversation

What's good about Rust as a general purpose PL compared to something like Nim? I've done non-trivial things in Rust and I felt like I was taking on a lot of complexity and losing a ton of abstraction for most my problems to benefit a small % of them.

Tooling, ecosystem, stability. Also some people prefer the more ML-style type system (over Nim). In comparison to FP langs, it provides a smooth transition to low level performance tuning.

I think there's lots to do with where you want to spend your 'annoyance points' too. I do feel sad about losing lots of abstraction, but have tried and failed with OPAM, stack, cabal, nix many times before.

deech

@deech

Again, this is about using it for general purpose computing where perf and memory req's aren't as stringent. And also, FWIW nimble the nim package manager works ok, though not as nice as Cargo.

Good to hear! Yeah, I've used D before (in a similar space to Nim), but personally value a safe ML-style type system with no null more than what those langs provide in general purpose programming. Would prefer OCaml/Reason or Haskell here.

deech

@deech

I really wish Nim had ML-ey ADTs+pattern matching. But lots of other good things in the works, concepts, and a RAII style scope based resource management (no runtime), compiler + std lib that bootstraps from gcc in 5 minutes, amazeballs C++ interop. But you can't have it all.

Nim also looks a whole ton prettier than Rust, which is something I value a quite a lot actually!

Sebastian Porto

@sebasporto

Nov 22, 2018

I done a bunch of both, I really like how easy to get started with Nim, and the code looks cleaner that Rust. But the error handling with exceptions is a big downside for me. Also the Nim ecosystem is quite lacking.