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by daveroberts 4187 days ago
Go and Rust and included in the Computer Language Benchmark game: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

Nim, and many of the other interesting languages mentioned in this thread are not.

I'm not sure if this is a cause or effect.

3 comments

https://github.com/def-/LPATHBench/blob/master/nim.nim

Statistics (on an x86_64 Intel Core2Quad Q9300):

    Lang    Time [ms]  Memory [KB]  Compile Time [ms]  Compressed Code [B]
    Nim          1400         1460                893                  486
    C++          1478         2717                774                  728
    D            1518         2388               1614                  669
    Rust         1623         2632               6735                  934
    Java         1874        24428                812                  778
    OCaml        2384         4496                125                  782
    Go           3116         1664                596                  618
    Haskell      3329         5268               3002                 1091
    LuaJit       3857         2368                  -                  519
    Lisp         8219        15876               1043                 1007
    Racket       8503       130284              24793                  741
That looks amazing. One would expect it to be slower given all of the interesting language features.

I've been wanting to learn one of the up and coming languages (Rust, D, Go, etc.). Would Nim be a good choice?

If you write C/C++ for a living but want a nicer syntax and better language features, then yes, absolutely. If you're looking for a specific niche, then it depends. I'm personally more excited about Rust than Nim, but I also don't do much systems programming these days, so I don't have a specific purpose in mind.
Why are you more excited about Rust?
Probably depends on what software you would like to develop and what languages you already know and enjoy.
Well I've been writing Python for quite a while and I'm currently getting into both Scala and JS/Node.
Not to mention, Nim still doesn't have a Wikipedia article because it is "not significant". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_(disambiguation)
I can't see where it says Nim (programming language) is "not significant". Maybe the reason there isn't a Wikipedia article is as simple as because nobody who has an account on Wikipedia had heard of or thought to create an article on Nim. The solution to which is quite simple, go create an article.
It used to have a page. It was deleted because the language was not considered significant. This is a relatively famous case, referred to frequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

> Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. Every source is WP:PRIMARY. Every one of them. Googling turned up posts to online discussion forums but nothing useful. Additionally, I note that the decision to delete at the previous AfD was unanimous for the same reasons.

> Perhaps think of it this way: a language becomes notable when people who haven't been involved in its creation start writing about it. If/when this language gets to that point you'll have no problem creating an article. At the moment, though, there just hasn't been enough uptake to get the coverage we need for notability.

The problem is that most sources about Nim are by Araq or not reliable enough.

I really dislike this policy when applied to programming languages. Things from pop culture are going to be referred to pervasively in the media and blogosphere, but programming languages don't get there without massive marketing pushes, press releases, etc.

That doesn't mean a language is not itself notable.

Anyway, there's plenty about Nim that is not primary:

http://goran.krampe.se/2014/10/13/here-comes-nim/

https://www.btbytes.com/notebooks/nimrod.html

http://picheta.me/articles/2013/10/about-nimrods-features.ht... (by Dominic Picheta but external to Nim website)

http://steved-imaginaryreal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/nimrod-re...

http://vocalbit.com/posts/exploring-type-classes-in-nimrod.h...

http://blog.ldlework.com/a-cursory-look-at-meta-programming-...

http://joshfilstrup.com/posts/2014-10-27-2014-monads-in-nim....

http://ziotom78.blogspot.de/2014/01/experiments-with-nimrod....

http://progopedia.com/language/nimrod/

https://geetduggal.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/consider-nimrod/

http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/nimrod-a-new-systems-prog... (by Andreas Rumpf - but definitely an indicator of notability)

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4749

http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2013/Oct-2013-10-05.what-i-like-...

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/nimrod (by Andreas Rumpf, but a sign of notability)

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Nimrod

http://gradha.github.io/articles/2014/11/swift-string-interp...

http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-tw...

http://felsin9.de/nnis/nimrod/nimrod-gpn14.pdf

http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/nim/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/nim?sort=votes&pag...

http://gradha.github.io/articles/2014/03/nimrod-for-cross-pl...

https://impythonist.wordpress.com/tag/nimrod/

https://github.com/trending?l=nimrod

http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2013/12/letterpress-cheating-in-...

That doesn't mean that the best resources aren't on the Nimrod website itself. But penalising a language for having excellent primary resources would be a bit crazy in my opinion.

I just discovered that blogs and other self published resources may not be used to establish notability for Wikipedia.

Basically Nim cannot ever become notable unless there are press releases about it or peer reviewed papers written on it. And without a company like Google garnering/writing press releases and none of the authors of Nim are at academic institutions... Well this is awkward.

Too many programming languages, too little time; and no one seems willing to make and publish measurements for all those "interesting" languages.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex