Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Tiberium 1510 days ago
> many of the more senior community members or those who have been around for a bit have migrated there

It's true that compiler developers like krux, Clyybber, saem migrated to nimskull, I don't disagree.

> but there are only a handful of folks remaining that have been around for more than a year or two

But I totally disagree with your false statements about "senior" community members (those who don't do compiler development) migrating to nimskull - this is not true at all. There are a lot of "senior" people left in the Nim community.

And again, nimskull isn't a "silver bullet" either. It has the flexibility to change major things in the language just because it's a hard fork and almost no one (except people who develop it) uses it for real projects, whereas Nim has an actual userbase that doesn't want their code to be broken, especially considering the fact that nimskull has already removed a lot of the stdlib libraries, especially async (which there is no alternative to in Nimskull).

2 comments

Most of the "senior" community members who have migrated to NimSkull are those who liked to work on the compiler. The ones who remains using Nim are those who like to write libraries and projects. I've yet to see anyone create a library or project with NimSkull, although that might be because I'm not too exposed to it. I would love to be proven wrong, but for the time being NimSkull looks like a good idea if they can pull it off. But currently it looks like ripping of the band-aid to get to a better place and currently it's still in the burning and stinging phase before things (hopefully) gets better.
I apologize if my sentiment came off as Nimskull is a realistic alternative for those who are frustrated with Nim - it certainly is not, and I think your description of the state of the project is spot on PMunch!
I guess your definition of senior and mine vary. I'd consider senior members anyone willing to work on the compiler, as they are the members with the potential to move the language forward and out of the mess it currently finds itself in.

Are there experienced programmers in the Nim community, sure? Are they able to fix Nim with Nim's leadership in place? Doubtful in my mind based on history.

Also, I apologize if it seemed like I was evangelizing Nimskull or suggesting folks switch to it. I agree it is in no shape to serve a replacement for Nim presently, and may not ever be.