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
  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    2·
    3 days ago

    Yeah I agree. Presumably they don’t do that though because you’d end up with pages of nothing but ).

    I never understood why they don’t add just a little syntactic sugar. You don’t need much to take it from a mess of brackets to something comprehensible.

    • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      2 days ago

      I never understood why they don’t add just a little syntactic sugar. You don’t need much to take it from a mess of brackets to something comprehensible.

      It was in the original design, but not the first implementation. By the time someone got around to it, people where used to S-expressions.