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by birdfood 1444 days ago
I've been diving into Nim in my free time after experimenting with Zig and Rust. I really appreciate how clearly I can layout business logic in code without needing to qualify what the compiler should do (my biggest issue with rust is all the stuff you need to do to satisfy the borrow checker I feel obfuscates your intention).

Getting to use Nim for your day job sounds like a dream! I'm particularly keen on Nim's UFCS
1 comments
girvo 1442 days ago
> I'm particularly keen on Nim's UFCS

One of my favourite parts about UFCS is how it can turn C libraries that I've had to bind into nice clean looking interfaces!

    esp_err_t sw_enableRx(SwSerial *self, bool State)
Becomes

    proc sw_enableRx*(self: ptr SwSerial, State: bool): esp_err_t {.importc: "$1", header: "<SwSerial.h>".}
Which when called is super lovely!

    var port = sw_open(params, etc)
    port.enableRx(true)
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birdfood 1442 days ago
The end result doesn't look anything like C! Really nice.

Nim almost feels like I'm writing a dynamic scripting language, except that I've worked with a typed python code base and it sucked because typing always felt taped on. With generics in Nim I feel like I'm duck typing, but my ducks are compile time checked!

I'm keen on experimenting with protocol oriented programming and as far as I understand, UFCS provides this really neatly to the language. I really like the idea of being able to define my own types and have them seamlessly work with functionality of other libs (and vice-versa) without needing to resort to a language feature like traits.

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girvo 1442 days ago
Absolutely! It's fantastic :)

One piece of advice I can give, is functional programming (which I am a huge proponent of), as defined by a tonne of chained/composed operations on sequences

   .map.filter.etc.etc()
Is not a good fit for Nim. `proc` is a really good reminder: its a procedural language, more than anything else!

You can still use a lot of FP ideas though, but one thing I always remind myself is at the end of the day Nim _is_ C, C is the output, so working within that idea helps a lot in terms of keeping things optimised with little effort on my behalf!

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