Re: Add Nim to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
So, building on the 40% or so of the benchmarks def did, I rounded out the other 60% and gave a PR to his repo. With more like hours than years of my time per program profiling/tweaking/optimizing, I got the Nim implementations to mostly parity with the top performers (Nim was in the top 3..6 impls on my machine for almost all tests). Of course, I did start most of those impls from "for years tweaked impls". Anyway, shortly after I finished that work, I also saw the annoying comment on Alioth about "No more languages! Do your own website", but I was lazy and did not. Kudos to you, bluenote for doing something. Looks pretty nice.
Re: Launching the 2017 Nim community survey
> I'll tell you right now that I would stop using Nim if it didn't have garbage > collection. I don't think it's an either or. Nim will always have some kind of GC. I interpreted the question more as "how important is no-GC programming in Nim to you". Think of competing with languages like C++ and D that allow an all-RAII solution to some problems. D in particular, since D has a GC, and the community is now addressing ways to deal with the challenges of applications that must NOT invoke it or even include in a runtime.
Re: Add Nim to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
> they ban certain languages "They" don't ban certain languages. > In contrast to the benchmarksgame no languages are forbidden per-se. There are no languages forbidden per-se. * * * Your project includes far-fewer programming languages than the benchmarks game. You must have banned even more languages! Or is it just too much work?
Re: Add Nim to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
I was a bit annoyed that they ban certain languages from their "game", so I started to collect my own set of silly benchmarks (plus a framework to make defining, running, and visualizing benchmarks easy): [https://bluenote10.github.io/SimpleLanguageBenchmarks](https://bluenote10.github.io/SimpleLanguageBenchmarks)/ The goal was to have a different focus by benchmarking simple/idiomatic implementations, e.g. to find out what performance I can expect from standard libraries in different languages. The Benchmark Game mainly compares what you can achieve over years of optimization => not the performance you get when you start out in a language. Unfortunately, I didn't get too far with the project, but Nim already looks really good . If anyone is interested in adding more benchmarks/implementation we could just run our ban-free benchmark suite.
Re: Add Nim to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
My alternative list 1. Reaching 1.0 stability 2. Reaching 1.0 stability 3. Reaching 1.0 stability forget standard lib, forget 3rd party (popular or not) packages and documentation. Think compiler only. Because they all would need to change if you keep changing core language features, like deprecating/removing methods or throwing away GC (page 7 on [Community Survey](https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/3018) ) or something...
Re: Add Nim to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
Hey jlp765,
I noticed that the benchmarks game website actually has a page somewhere
explaining that they are not going to add Crystal, Nim and other new and
upcoming languages ("so please stop asking" they say). The suggestion from the
creator is that you make your own website for those languages, separate to the
benchmarks game. I can't find the link at the moment, but I think it is
basically due to wanting to keep it to the most commonly used languages.
But I agree, Nim needs a way to make itself known, but I think that probably
requires a few things first judging by some of the reactions that pop up on
reddit/hackernews/ycombinator:
1. Reaching 1.0 stability - there might be little point advertising an
unfinished product, unless it is to get people to help finish it. A lot of the
time it seems people come in and say "Oh, it isn't stable yet? I'll wait until
my project isn't going to break before trying it.". I think there might be more
help gained from advertising it as an opportunity to contribute and help build
out the language. I know Rust gets the community pretty involved with things
like:
[https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/05/libz-blitz.html](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/05/05/libz-blitz.html),
I'm not sure how easy that would be, but maybe if we are lacking certain
libraries or they are not well maintained then it might be worth asking for
help from and directing the community a little more in order to help get to 1.0
quicker or have a more complete ecosystem when it does reach 1.0.
2. A popular package that raises awareness and brings people in due to
showing Nim's strengths - rather than trying to force it on people, which they
can see as obnoxious. My guess is this will be in gaming or
scientific/financial/data analysis based off what I've seen the most effort put
into on Github.
3. More/better documentation. While the documentation is probably extensive
enough, there isn't a great volume of simple examples and tutorials to go
through, and perhaps the documentation isn't so easy for a beginner looking in,
at least in my opinion, and is probably geared more towards experienced
programmers as it assumes a bit of knowledge.
Anyway, my thoughts looking in as a relative newcomer and seeing performance
benchmarks probably aren't the biggest stumbling blocks that Nim faces in
trying to grow in popularity.
Add Nim to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game?
@def has written [Nim code](https://github.com/def-/nim-benchmarksgame) for most of the benchmarks in [The Computer Language Benchmarks Game](https://forum.nim-lang.org/benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/) Is it worth everyone checking to see if the code can be improved, and then submitting this to the site for addition to the benchmarks? It is yet another way to "advertise" the language.
