I’ve been researching programming languages to find a good, high level language that compiles to a single binary that is preferably pretty small. After tons of research, I landed on Nim and used it to make a quick txt parser for a project I’m doing.
Nim seems absolutely fantastic. Despite being sold as a systems programming language, it feels like Python without any of its drawbacks (it’s fast, statically typed, etc.) - and the text parser I made is only a 50kb binary!
Has anyone here tried Nim? What’s your experience with it? Are there any hidden downsides aside from being kinda unpopular?
Bonus: I want to give a shoutout to how easy it is to open a text file and parse it line-by-line in this language. Look at how simple and elegant this syntax is:
import os
if paramCount() == 0:
quit("No file given as argument", 1)
let filepath = paramStr(1)
if not fileExists(filepath):
quit("File not found: " & filepath, 1)
for line in lines(filepath):
echo line
Yeah tbh I’m not sure what the reason for using a systems programming language other than either Rust or C would be. Rust by default for safety (and it’s as performant as any other systems language), C if you either need to work with an existing C codebase or want to be able to more easily do unsafe stuff. Or if you need to compile quickly. I’m sure the other languages have their benefits but not to the extent where I would both want to learn it and have use cases for it where I would choose that language over Rust or C for a project.
Nim is more “high level, automatic memory management by default, but you can go 100% manual if you need to”, though the reality of doing that is basically the opposite of rust’s “everything you need to do is well-documented and solid”