Why Nim?

Here's a summary of the themes discussed in the Hacker News thread, presented with markdown headers and direct quotes:

Nim's Ecosystem and Target Audience

A central theme is Nim's relatively small ecosystem and the resulting need for users to create their own libraries. This is seen by some as a negative, while others view it as an opportunity.

• "Nim is a programming language for an expert programmer. The ecosystem is very small and for everything a little bit more specialized you need to make a library yourself." - mathverse
• "When there's a vacuum like that, that is also an opportunity for folks to make a significant impact. Compare to other communities where you need to stand out from the noise." - andsoitis
• "Personal anecdote: I was exactly there a decade ago when I was working on Chrono, now one of best-known date and time libraries in Rust. Since I was simply my own, my design was not as good as it could have been." - lifthrasiir
• "Whenever I’m missing a library I’m usually just 5 mins away from successfully using a C library (or any library with a C API). In my years doing data analysis, signal processing, and just writing plain servers I’ve never once gotten stuck because of a missing library." - summary

Nim's Strengths: Metaprogramming and Developer Experience

Nim's powerful metaprogramming capabilities, including compile-time functions and macros, are highlighted as significant advantages. Additionally, the language's design is praised for facilitating a smooth development experience without constant friction.

• "Nim has one of the most powerful metaprogramming systems out there. Hygienic templates, easy macros, but my favorite is the compile-time functions. Nim compiler has an embedded VM, so any Nim code (that doesn't rely on FFI) can run at compile time." - archargelod
• "Yes, compile-time execution in Nim is very natural, if you mark a variable "const" or use some other ways, you can run almost all pure-Nim code at compile-time without having to modify it." - Tiberium
• "For me, the killer feature of Nim is that I can just write code without having to constantly fight the language." - xigoi
• "I program a lot in Nim including professionally and strongly prefer it over Rust or even Zig. Primarily because I just really enjoy programming in Nim and getting things done I wouldn’t have otherwise or be capable of doing." - elcritch

The "Rust Challenge": Competition and Adoption

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Nim's position relative to Rust. The prevailing sentiment is that languages need a unique selling proposition to gain traction, and Rust has successfully carved out a niche with memory safety without garbage collection. This makes it a formidable competitor, especially in systems programming.

• "I often wonder why some languages succeed while others falter. Why did Rust break through, for example, while so many other excellent languages didn't." - rich_sasha
• "I guess a lot of languages are kind of fungible. If you want a fast, cross platform, GC-based OOP language, the truth is, there are many choices. ... The ones that make it offer something very unique, not merely better than peers. So Rust, as a memory-safer non-GC language has a clear use case with little or no competition. Nim doesn't have this luxury. I wish it well, I like the language and often contemplated learning it properly. But I fear the odds are against it." - rich_sasha
• "I really feel for new languages that have to compete with Rust. It’s probably easier than it’s ever been to create a high quality new language but to get as good as Rust has become just takes so much time and collective effort that it can be out of reach for most ecosystems/groups of builders." - hardwaresofton
• "For example Zig is probably the most impressive new language, and it’s got a ton of awesome stuff but the chance that I’m going to adopt it over a language with often comparable performance that is ALSO much safer? Rounds to zero." - hardwaresofton
• "Rust was backed by Mozilla at first and now it's backed by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others... Go and Rust don't compete, Go has a GC, they're in fundamentally different domains." - dismalaf
• "I almost always choose Go over Rust when they are similarly suited to something. I only use Rust when Go's safety isn't sufficient. Go is a joy to use, Rust rarely is (in my experience)." - steve_adams_86
• "Concur on the [special case] of rust: It's in a domain that only has a handful of competitors (For its core competencies of system performing, high-performance programming, and embedded). It has learned from , and made improvements on them." - the__alchemist
• "Nim fixes many of the issues I had with Python. First, I can now make games with Nim because it’s super fast and easily interfaces with all of the high performance OS and graphics APIs. Second, typos no longer crash in production because the compiler checks everything. If it complies it runs. Finally, refactors are easy, because the compiler practically guides you through them." - treeform
• "I don’t know how they are relevant because I've said nothing about my experience or seniority in this discussion" - akkad33
• "Maybe some day I’ll have the brain cells and skill to write code in zig and be confident I’m Not introducing a whole class of gnarly bugs, but it seems like I should just focus my limited brain power on writing high" - akkad33

The Role of Funding and Corporate Backing

The success of programming languages is strongly linked to financial resources and corporate sponsorship. Languages with substantial backing (like Rust) appear to have an advantage in ecosystem development and long-term sustainability compared to those without it.

• "$$$money$$$" - xigoi
• "Rust (backed by a foundation) won over Go (backed by Google). Oh, and remember Dart (backed by Google)?" - hk__2
• "A strong tooling ecosystem needs money, which usually means corporate sponsorship." - miggy
• "It's actually really expensive to make a good programming language that's widely used. Forget about syntax or semantics or unique features or whatever. Having money and resources are the most important factor for a successful language." - bobajeff

LLMs and Developer Productivity

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) is discussed as a potential game-changer for developer productivity and language adoption. Some believe LLMs will democratize programming, making niche languages more accessible, while others argue LLMs will further entrench mainstream languages due to their larger training data.

• "The notion that we need to all program in the top 10 popular programming languages seems dead with the advent of LLMs." - elcritch
• "It’s true, in many cases they are fungible. Though much less so for languages which compile to native code. LLMs do lower the barrier to switching." - elcritch
• "To my mind, to the contrary :( LLMs get trained on corpora of existing texts, including source code. They become much better at massively used languages because of the plethora of training data, and struggle with more niche languages because of the dearth of good examples. It's a positive feedback loop for mainstream languages, because more stuff gets vibe-coded, or code-assisted when the AI does a better job at it. It's a negative feedback loop for niche languages because the opportunity cost of choosing them grows :(" - nine_k
• "That hasn’t been my experience with Nim so far. Both Claude 4 and GPT5 both one shot Nim code almost perfectly now. They even made a Nim JavaScript app for me." - elcritch
• "Using LLMs to build the libraries you need seems like a fantastic way to work with them, since they've probably been trained on code that does similar things." - DennisP
• "It was dead prior to this. A subset of programmers think it's hard to program in any other language other than the one or two they studied. They are wrong. Most programming languages are very very similar. And learning one means you learned almost all. i learned new languages on the regular pre - llms and it required barely any effort." - ninetyninenine

Opinions on Significant Whitespace

A recurring and often contentious topic is Nim's use of significant whitespace. While some find it to be a clean and enjoyable feature, others view it as a negative, leading to difficulties with copy-pasting and potential for subtle bugs.

• "Significant whitespace is a dealbreaker for me. I never tried Nim for this reason" - efilife
• "Hello, Python Critic from the 1990's. Welcome to the future" - krupan
• "Hello fellow programmer from the middle ages; we discovered long ago that significant whitespace is a dead end, the fact that it's popular with the wannabes changes nothing." - codr7
• "I hated significant whitespace when I tried Python first time. Years later I found Nim and indentation didn't bother me as much. Maybe we both just got bad first expression with most popular, but unfortunately not a good language? =)" - archargelod
• "Python was my first language using significant whitespace, and it was a breath of fresh air. That was a bit over 20 years ago, I think. I've learned several other languages since then, but I never "looked back" in any meaningful way." - zahlman
• "Every time I copy paste something in python I have to check the whitespace. Often there's a problem that needs fixing, like the first line indented differently, or everything is off. Sometimes I'm not paying perfect attention and get hard to catch bugs. I'm now certain that significant whitespace is simply wrong." - lostdog
• "Yes, optimize for the thing you do once in a great while over having to read/type redundant braces constantly. Wouldn’t want to have to pay attention and use the tab key! ;-)" - mixmastamyk
• "On the other hand, I hate languages that are polluted with ugly bracket noise, so Nim is appealing to me for this reason" - froobius
• "Spaces don't copy n paste well and are hard to read/navigate" - sigmonsays
• "But significant whitespace has always made sense to me. You are going to indent your code anyway, so you might as well give the indentation some meaning. I write Python, JavaScript and Lua most of the time, and I never waste any thought on whitespace VS braces VS keyword delimiters." - HiPhish
• "It's harder to tell where code blocks end just by looking" - efilife
• "A language shouldn't force me to a particular code style" - efilife

Nim vs. Other Languages (Beyond Rust)

Discussions also touch upon Nim's positioning relative to other languages like Go, Python, and Zig, exploring their respective strengths, weaknesses, and perceived niches.

• "Remember when Rust and Go were comparable? Feels like forever ago when they both just looked like “new systems programming languages” a we know how that turned out." - hardwaresofton
• "They were never intended for the same niches. Go is a Java/Python replacement. Rust is more of a C/subset of C++ replacement. They were compared mostly because they had usable versions released at approximately the same time, but you (correctly) don’t see those comparisons anymore." - baq
• "Rust was backed by Mozilla at first and now it's backed by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others... Go and Rust don't compete, Go has a GC, they're in fundamentally different domains." - dismalaf
• "Dart is doing just fine in the Flutter space." - rjh29
• "I can now make games with Nim because it’s super fast and easily interfaces with all of the high performance OS and graphics APIs." - treeform
• "Gentle correction: Python is typed now too and you can get the benefits of typing both in your IDE (via LSP) and before deploying to production (via mypy and the like). This happens both by type inference as well as explicit type annotations." - linsomniac
• "Nim is in the awkward middle area where it's got a GC so it'll never replace C/C++ but it also isn't as productive as something like Ruby." - dismalaf
• "Nim 2 does not have a mandatory gc. It is recommended to use ARC, which has similar semantics to C++, ie moves, copies, etc." - miguel_martin

Developer Motivation and Ease of Use

The personal experience and motivation of developers are framed as crucial factors in language choice. Some find Rust's strictness helps their motivation, while others feel it saps their energy, finding Nim or Zig to be more appealing due to their perceived simplicity and speed.

• "For me, programming is about corralling motivation more than anything else. Rust saps my motivation is ways that Zig does not." - bsder
• "Yes, agree with you a lot! Maybe our brains are just wired differently, for me, no other language (until now) gives me as much motivation as Rust, as it's type system and docs make me feel really good." - bilkow
• "Zig is simply a much smaller language than Rust. I use Zig because my brain isn't big enough for either C++ or Rust. I'm not a 10x programmer, but I still want to get stuff done. Zig and C enable me to do that without bending my brain." - bsder
• "I use Zig because my brain isn't big enough for either C++ or Rust." - bsder
• "I wouldn't put Rust and C++ in the same league there as far as brain size requirements, but point taken!" - hardwaresofton
• "I've done some programming in Nim. It’s a nice language but I felt frustrated whenever I wanted to do something I knew I could do in python but that didn’t work in Nim. I just missed some of the syntactic sugar of python, that being said I would love to get back into Nim again." - zero0529