Nim programming language finally hit 1.0

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 1 October 2019 at 10:43:24 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 October 2019 at 10:05:31 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
> wrote:
>> Which niches are these?
[...]
> Look at the companies listed here:
>
> https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html
>
> and the posters who say "everything's great" often work for one 
> of those companies. Weka.io and Symmetry come to mind. It's 
> mostly real time (e.g. Funkwerk, sociomantic) and high 
> throughput stuff (Weka.io etc.). It's mostly cloud / server 
> based (that's why mobile is regarded unimportant). This is 
> perfectly fine, if that's what D wants, but please be clear 
> about it.

That list is a bit difficult to assess as some of the companies 
have not moved forward with the language, but doesn't some of the 
those that have gone with D wholesale use their own runtimes?

But yes, real time seems to be a niche with some adoption. 
Batch-dataprocessing seems to be a niche (I assume this accounts 
for situations where developers have failed to bring Python or 
other high level language up to the performance they wanted).

But there isn't really many features in the language that makes 
it particularly well suited for real time or dataprocessing. It 
is mostly on the library/runtime level.

So my current impression, from that list, is that there is no 
particular niche where it is the best option. There is not enough 
adoption in any particular niche IMO. (Compared to other "new" 
languages that have significant growth.)

> It calls my attention, though, that at Mercedes-Benz R&D "D is 
> used for software development tools." Apparently, they're not 
> yet convinced, and if you look at the other organizations 
> above, they can afford to use a highly specialized, exotic 
> language like D, because they're not too big and use it for 
> very specific tasks. But once things get bigger, e.g. 
> Mercedes-Benz, the company starts to tread more carefully.

Right, what it suggests is that  Mercedes-Benz R&D  don't see any 
obvious solution for what they want to do, so they look at 
smaller languages. Then they will try it for some task, but the 
acid test is if they expand as they go forward.

Although, I do suspect that many people/managers tend to be 
inclined to try out languages that looks (syntax and feature 
wise) like something they already know. So if they look for 
something C-like it doesn't really tell us much about whether a 
more esoteric language like Rust would be "better" or "worse" for 
the task they try to solve. So that Rust is expanding in some 
niches despite having a syntax that is alien to many makes me 
more confident that they are carving a niche of their own. It is 
more difficult to make this argument for languages like Nim and D.