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by rlipsc 1305 days ago
It's great to hear Nim in production stories!

> I feel like Nim made me fall in love with programming again.

Same. It's just so frictionless and productive, and you know your code will run on basically any platform in a nice, efficient, self contained executable.

For me it's a language of sensible defaults. Speed and safety first, and opt-in machine level control. Want to target that obscure microcontroller? No worries: https://github.com/PMunch/ratel.

Want to use Unreal? Sure: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE.

Want to target the web? Native React support with https://github.com/andreaferretti/react.nim or web apps with https://github.com/karaxnim/karax.

The list goes on! https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Curated-Packages

But, what if you want to use that battle tested C++ library? Nim can compile to C++ so you have native ABI FFI!

There's also a lot to be said for automation with AST macros. The language is built around them, they're not just a tacked on after thought. As a result, it's very easy to do everything from removing boilerplate copy pasta errors to creating mini languages or even generating APIs from data. This can give you new paradigms in approaching solutions for things that are quite painful in other languages.

I feel like this language could be a weapon of mass production for many businesses once they dip their toes in!

1 comments

It's less that "Reddit uses NIM" but rather one guy at Reddit uses NIM to do work. I see tech debt on the horizon.
> It's less that "Reddit uses NIM" but rather one guy at Reddit uses NIM to do work.

They are the same thing. No one is saying Reddit bases their entire infrastructure on Nim. The point is just that the language is being successfully used in a business context.

This might not be important to you if you're not a user of the language, but for people that are, it is significant for two reasons: 1) it shows it's 'good enough' to do analytics & data processing for a large, data heavy company and 2) creates confidence/proof it can be used in a business context.

As for technical debt, I doubt that's the case. The post mentions internal tools and processing, these kind of things are often not subject to high developer churn.

Besides, Nim has a pretty easy to read syntax that's similar to Python. People who have talked about onboarding developers to the language (such as https://youtu.be/5wljNaPkU7M?t=586) say it has been fairly straightforward to train for if desired.