[bawolff]

Rust has the elevator pitch down: C but memory safe.

"very exciting features such as macro support, pythonic syntax, transpiles to C/C++/JavaScript, no VM, systems programming language, suitable for hard real-time systems etc" is not a good elevator pitch. Its a little bit of everything with no clear focus point.

So I'd say rust had better marketing.

[dijit]

Sorry to be a pedant but it's likely more like: "C++, but memory safe".

[bawolff]

I feel like rust has been having a lot of success recently in areas that were previously dominated by c not c++, but i'm not that familar with the rust landscape so maybe i am mistaken.

[steveklabnik]

No, you’re right. There’s just a crowd of people that go “Rust is more complex than C and C++ is more complex than C therefore Rust is more like C++ than C.”

Yet tons of people (like myself) who have preferred C to C++ still like Rust more. Categorization just isn’t that simple.

[LinAGKar]

But without the C++ awkwardness

[carlmr]

Pitch: Like Python, but faster and multicore.

At least it's the reason I tried it once.

It was not a bad experience.

[bawolff]

That is definitely a decent pitch. I think if nim oriented itself around that pitch more it would do better.

However i do wonder how big the market is for "python, but faster and multicore". I suspect it is smaller than "c but safe".

[theshrike79]

The problem with that for me is "like Python" implies a HUGE collection of libraries I can use to connect to pretty much anything.

With Python I can just search "python <thing>" and find popular, well-maintained, libraries to do <thing>. I can't do that with Nim. Most of the stuff I find seems to be 5-9 years old and have no updates since.

[xigoi]

Nim allows you to use libraries for C and C++, as well as Python with the NimPy library, so the situation is not that bad if you don't mind getting your hands dirty.

[iopq]

Except THAT library only supports Python 2.7.x

[polotics]

sorry what do you mean?

[Sohcahtoa82]

They're poking fun at how sometimes you'll find a Python library that does exactly what you want with an interface that feels incredibly intuitive, but you end up finding out it was never updated to work in Python 3.x, only 2.x.

Though I'm not really sure how often that happens these days unless you're trying to write code that's using an old protocol that's fallen out of favor, like IRC, FTP, or Gopher.

[actualwitch]

Python will probably also be "faster and multicore" with latest proposals, so it's not a very good pitch.

[carlmr]

Python has been getting faster, but Nim I'm sure is still a few multiples above Python.

The problem is that CPython was never built with efficiency in mind and now it's hard to add it.

[xigoi]

How about the motto: “Efficient, Expressive, Elegant”?

[bawolff]

I don't think that is particularly good either. It is too vauge. Just subjective adjectives. Nothing concrete.

Not to mention, everyone aims for those traits. It is not unique enough.

[xigoi]

Everyone? Python doesn't aim for efficient. C++ doesn't aim for expressive or elegant.

[Gigachad]

If you told me to guess what language that motto is from, I'd have no idea. It could be basically any of them. If you say "C, but memory safe" I know it's Rust.

[xigoi]

Well, that's only because Rust is better known.