Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gilrain 1922 days ago
The first one most people run into: Nim is roughly as performant as Rust, but it's easier to learn because it's garbage collected. But it's also not garbage collected, if you prefer (with caveats). Want a different flavor of garbage collected? We have three (with caveats)!
1 comments
SolitudeSF 1922 days ago
thats not a different way of doing same thing, its doing different thing. this not even an argument, if language can provide multiple memory management strategies, in what world is that a bad thing?

and if you somehow confused about choice (of gc), you should stick to default.

also, there is no such thing as "There is Only One Way to Do It" languages. your entire argument is just a circlejerk point.

link
gilrain 1922 days ago
Is Nim garbage collected? There is no simple answer to that.

When it is garbage collected, how is it garbage collected? There is no simple answer to that.

As stated in my original comment, I prefer languages which are more opinionated than that. Nim is a Swiss Army knife; some people like that, but I prefer choosing a fixed-blade knife to suit my current purpose.

link
cb321 1921 days ago
Is C garbage collected? There is no simple answer to that. Link with Boehm (or something similar) and it is. These things are often (with almost any language) aspects of the implementation & deployment, and most mature languages have multiple answers as well. Is Python "compiled"? Well, with Pypy or Cython or etc. it is. (Or maybe it's always at least "compiled" to byte codes run by a slow byte code interpreter.) Etc., etc. I think your standards for "simplicity" or univalence may be, as @SolitudeSF alluded to, unsatisfied by even prog.lang's you like (which you gave no concrete examples of).
link
planetis 1921 days ago
> Is Nim garbage collected? There is no simple answer to that.

Yes, Nim v1 is a garbage collected language. It also shipped with custom destructors support https://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/destructors.html.

Nim v2, which is hopefully two releases away, will ship with a memory management scheme called "orc" https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/12/08/introducing-orc.html

However right now, it is recommended that all new code is written with the `--gc:orc` switch.

link