[cdcarter]

I spent last week (with Opus, of course) porting the xv6-riscv teaching operating system to a bunch of different languages. Zig, Nim, LISP, and Swift.

The improvements in embedded Swift have definitely made it one of the most enjoyable/productive languages to work on the OS. I feel like I can build useful abstractions that wrap raw memory access and make the userland code feel very neat.

On the other hand, the compilation times are SO bad, that I'm really focusing on the Nim port anyway.

[sspiff]

It's been a long time since I came across Nim. I thought it was really interesting about 12 years ago. What made you land on Nim instead of any of the more obvious alternatives?

[cdcarter]

I was looking for something that allows easy access to direct memory, with a syntax thats a little easier to explain than C. Frankly, zig was not actually a real viable option based on that syntax requirement but I still wanted to explore it.

Nim really is clean and simple.

[flykespice]

Yeah, for a language that claims to be a better modern alternative to C, zig verbose syntax is really an eyesore to look at compared the very same codebase written in C...

I lost immediately any interest on it

[seanw444]

Nim is really incredible. The only things I cannot get over is the fact that it goes the inheritance route in a way I find to be hacky and fragile (no more than one level, really?) and traits are not a core feature. If Nim's primary approach was composition + Rust-style traits (that work at compiletime and runtime), I'd have a hard time wanting to use anything else.

[PKop]

How about Odin?

[functional_dev]

yeah, Nim is great for that... much easier to explain to others than C or Zig especially for math code

[nesarkvechnep]

LISP like McCarthy LISP?