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by elcritch 28 days ago
Nim also has top notch meta programming, probably more so than Zig. You can easily do loop unrolling, specialization, etc. For example Constantine, which is a constant time crypto library that outperforms C, etc.

To me programming Rust feels so limiting due to lack of good compile time meta programming with types. That’s the key.
2 comments
afdbcreid 28 days ago
How can you create constant-time code with Nim when none of its backends support it (e.g. LLVM may turn an apparently-constant-time code into non-constant-time assembly)?
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cb321 28 days ago
You can see all the details at: https://github.com/mratsim/constantine , but to answer your "how" question briefly here, something Nim shares with most (all?) "systems programming languages" is "easy" integration with assembly languages -- whatever the backend for "most" compiled code is (whatever that "most" even is - weighted by any number of measures of static source size or dynamic instruction counts). Of course, hand-rolled assembly can cost you a lot in portability/effort to port to new platforms/etc.

The entire concept of the "performance of a PLang" in terms of the run-time of programs written "mostly in it" is rather seriously under-specified, TBH. This is (or should be) uncontentious in spite of the slew of articles with titles like the one for this thread.

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elcritch 28 days ago
Exactly, Constantine generates assembly output and links that into normal Nim objects (e.g. C). That can then used in Nim or in Rust, Go, etc.

From its "Why Nim" in the readme:

- Assembly support either inline or a simple {.compile: "myasm.S".} away

- No GC if no GC-ed types are used (automatic memory management is set at the type level and optimized for latency/soft-realtime by default and can be totally deactivated).

- Procedural macros working directly on AST to create generic curve configuration, derive constants write a size-independent inline assembly code generator

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zamalek 28 days ago
I have tried Nim meta programming (to make a tree vaguely like the one used by Zed), and the tooling support of pretty dreadful. I ran into multiple compiler crashes or simply unhelpful and confusing error messages, alongside LSP hangs.
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