D vs nim

[Timothee Cour via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Timothee Cour <thelastmammoth at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think people interested in D should take a closer look at nim and judge
> for yourself ; http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html is a good starting point
> (docs in general are very well written).
>
> I went through their tutorials and here are some first impressions:
>
> * nim is already bootstrapped (self-compiles)
> * feature set is very rich, many features (semantic and syntax) not found
> in D or improving the ones in D, eg hygenic macros,
> * many key features of D (static if, type inference, CTFE, UFCS, lambda,
> template constraints).
> * The syntax seems more orthogonal with fewer bultin constructs and many
> generated by library, eg: 'a>b is a hygyenic macro that generates 'b<a';
> associative arrays (tables) are in library
> * documentation in code uses markdown (less noisy than D's)
>  * named parameter arguments
> * tooling (nimble package manager ~dub, nimfix ~= gofix; nimgrep ~=
> dscanner);
> * etc...
>
> less good or tradeoffs:
>
> * C backend instead of (LLVM,gcc or dmd's; but they're working on it
> * uses yield-based ranges instead of D-based ranges (maybe simpler to
> write but less efficient?)
>

Other issues with that: this provides a less flexibility (eg infinite
ranges, bidirectional ranges etc)


> * forward declarations needed (docs says this may change)
> * thread-local GC (no stop the world)
> * RAII still experimental it seems
> * mutually importing modules seem possible; but doc says: Modules that
> depend on each other are possible, but strongly discouraged; it's very
> common in D
> * mutually recursive types. In Nim these types can only be declared within
> a single type section. (Anything else would require arbitrary symbol
> lookahead which slows down compilation.)
>
> not sure whether language has those; need to look more in the docs:
> * delegates
>

Actually they do have delegates (just not mentioned in the tutorial)


> * template variadic (but has varargs[T])
> * not sure whether we can have template parameters which are other than a
> type
>

> It would be nice to have a wiki page to describe this further feature by
> feature. Many ideas would be great to incorporate in D too btw.
>
> On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 2:26 PM, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d <
> digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Friday, 10 April 2015 at 18:52:24 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
>>
>>> The only things I've read about nim have been on the D forums - it seems
>>> the wikipedia article is even being considered for deletion due to not
>>> being noteworthy. So I think you might have trouble finding any comparisons.
>>>
>>
>> Read the comments sections on other languages on Reddit programming and
>> you'll see their spam all over the place.
>>
>> I've never used Nim (and don't plan to because I've been turned off by
>> their constant spamming of comment threads on Reddit) but the numerous
>> comments I've seen repeatedly indicate that Nim is not yet ready for real
>> use.
>>
>
>

I would like to refocus this thread on feature set and how it compares to
D, not on flame wars about brackets or language marketing issues.
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