I think people interested in D should take a closer look at nim and judge for yourself ; http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html is a good starting point (docs in general are very well written).
I went through their tutorials and here are some first impressions: * nim is already bootstrapped (self-compiles) * feature set is very rich, many features (semantic and syntax) not found in D or improving the ones in D, eg hygenic macros, * many key features of D (static if, type inference, CTFE, UFCS, lambda, template constraints). * The syntax seems more orthogonal with fewer bultin constructs and many generated by library, eg: 'a>b is a hygyenic macro that generates 'b<a'; associative arrays (tables) are in library * documentation in code uses markdown (less noisy than D's) * named parameter arguments * tooling (nimble package manager ~dub, nimfix ~= gofix; nimgrep ~= dscanner); * etc... less good or tradeoffs: * C backend instead of (LLVM,gcc or dmd's; but they're working on it * uses yield-based ranges instead of D-based ranges (maybe simpler to write but less efficient?) * forward declarations needed (docs says this may change) * thread-local GC (no stop the world) * RAII still experimental it seems * mutually importing modules seem possible; but doc says: Modules that depend on each other are possible, but strongly discouraged; it's very common in D * mutually recursive types. In Nim these types can only be declared within a single type section. (Anything else would require arbitrary symbol lookahead which slows down compilation.) not sure whether language has those; need to look more in the docs: * delegates * template variadic (but has varargs[T]) * not sure whether we can have template parameters which are other than a type It would be nice to have a wiki page to describe this further feature by feature. Many ideas would be great to incorporate in D too btw. On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 2:26 PM, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d < [email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, 10 April 2015 at 18:52:24 UTC, weaselcat wrote: > >> The only things I've read about nim have been on the D forums - it seems >> the wikipedia article is even being considered for deletion due to not >> being noteworthy. So I think you might have trouble finding any comparisons. >> > > Read the comments sections on other languages on Reddit programming and > you'll see their spam all over the place. > > I've never used Nim (and don't plan to because I've been turned off by > their constant spamming of comment threads on Reddit) but the numerous > comments I've seen repeatedly indicate that Nim is not yet ready for real > use. >
