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
  • TechnoCat@lemmy.ml
    13·
    2 days ago

    I wrote a small program that hits a few NWS endpoints and prints out formatted to the terminal. I wrote it in fish, typescript, rust, and nim. Most of my experience is in typescript, rust, java, and kotlin. Nim was my favorite of the bunch. Some syntax things were not my cup of tea, but when you have programmed in so many languages it starts to not matter and feels more like lipstick.

    My biggest con with nim was that most of the nim libraries I came across are unmaintained and incomplete and undocumented. I think the language and toolset is pretty great though.