[shirleyquirk]

which benchmarks? I play the language benchmark game sometimes and I can always get within 10% of the fastest contender. Beating the fastest contender,though, is rarely possible without using the unsafe subset of Nim, hence `-d:danger`

[MrBuddyCasino]

I've digged some more, and indeed in numeric tests Nim is often close to C. Its hard to find good data though, with documented compiler flags and recent versions.

[shirleyquirk]

There are definitely slow bits of the Nim stdlib; json parsing for example. String-heavy code is easy to make slow in Nim, too.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Yes the benchmark against Crystal was heavy on strings (json & base64) and Crystal seems to do better there. Whats the reason, Nim using refcounting?