D and Nim

Brian Rogoff via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jan 4 21:57:04 PST 2015


On Monday, 5 January 2015 at 01:21:07 UTC, Vlad Levenfeld wrote:
> Could you elaborate on the difference between D's 
> templates/mixins and Nim's macros/type classes?

I'd suggest you read the available documentation on each feature; 
for example Nim's user defined type classes are described here

http://nim-lang.org/manual.html#user-defined-type-classes

and the Nim's templates/macros are also described with examples 
in the manual. One caveat is that user defined type classes are 
not really useable now and will probably be feature gated (not 
removed as some other poster here suggested) so it's not fair to 
talk about them as though they actually exist now. They're more 
like multiple alias this or D's precise GC ;-). D templates (what 
is called generics in Nim) are more powerful than Nim generics. 
Maybe Nim will pick up some of those features (HKTs are a desired 
feature in Rust and maybe in Nim too) and maybe not.

It's really difficult to compare languages and features. Like I 
said, pick a small project and write some code in each. I found 
Nim really easy to pick up for small projects; a bit easier than 
D and much easier than Rust, which I like, but find slow going.



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