Nim: An Introduction

nim.txt

What is Nim?
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Nim is an incredibly fast systems and applications programming language that is expressive, extensible and fun to use.

Why Nim?
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Expressive
    - Clean syntax
    - Universal function call syntax (UFCS)
    - First class function + closures
    - Intutive type system
    - Operator overloading
    - Rich standard library [batteries included]

Metaprogramming
    - Generics
    - Templates
    - Macros

Efficient
    - Compile time function evaluation (CTFE)
    - Fast project compilation
    - Speeds comparable to C/C++
    - Fine tune control over GC
    - Compact binaries
    - No runtime needed

Cross Platform
    - Supports various backends C/C++/Object-C and Javascript
    - FFI

Laundry list of features:
- Support for multi tasking
    - Concurrency: async/await
    - Parallelism:
        - threads: GC safe, own isolated heap
        - threadpool: faster and simpler
- Basic OOP
- Iterators

Links:
  - https://nim-lang.org
  - Nim in Action https://www.manning.com/books/nim-in-action
  - Getting started:
          - https://github.com/def-/nim-unsorted
          - https://nim-by-example.github.io/
  - Sinatra like web framework https://github.com/dom96/jester
  - Awesome blog posts https://hookrace.net/blog/

Why not Nim?
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- Latent compiler bugs
- Occasional breaking changes to the standard library 
- Not v1.0 (yet)

Random thoughts 
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- Python will overtake java as most the used language [its too big to fail now]
- Due to microservice architecture its easy to plug a new language in your ecosystem. No need for big rewrites
- If you need performance and distribution and dont want to leave the familarity of Python's expressive syntax