I want to encourage on your journey with Nim. Nim can be a challenge especially if you are coming from a dynamic language like Python. Because Nim has a nice and reasonably friendly syntax for most cases. It is not a Python-like language. You can not approach Nim like Python. It is a system's level language. And as such it can offer you things Python can not. But it will also require from you things Python does not.
In my journey with Nim, I have approached it from a high level. I am still learning my rhythm for developing with Nim and my style. The challenging part for a person who is primarily coming from a higher level language is that Nim on the surface feels pretty high level. But then there are times when it pulls you down lower than you are accustomed to. You may start with more naive approaches to problems, similar to how you might of in Python. It may work. It may be sub-optimal. But there are solutions. This forum is very helpful. People here will help direct you toward a more idiomatic Nim solution. Once again, it may require more from you than Python. But it will give more back. Eventually you will become comfortable in Nim and these issues will become fewer and fewer. Nim is far from slow. In my app I am parsing GBs of data. I started with a split-like solution. Moved to Nim's csv. Then I changed the format of my data to fixed width columns. Now I read in x number of bytes at a time and process. I can now process 2GB of data with over 77million rows of data in 24 seconds. That is if I compile with -d:release. If I do not then the data parsing is over 3 minutes. You will want to use debug mode while you are developing so that you have debug information when you encounter problems. But if you are ready to release or simply test performance. You will want to compile with -d:release. There are also time when you can pass C compiler flags into Nim via -passC: and possibly get even more amazing performance gains. It greatly depends on your app. Be encouraged. Ask questions. When Nim pulls you under to a lower level than you understand. Ask. Get help. Keep going. It is worth it.
