I've bounced around a few languages this year, looking for a language to use in my spare time for fun / enjoyment / skills growth (I have a similar set of criteria to you). I've looked at rust, swift, haxe, zig, and now nim, and I think I'll be sticking with nim. I like that it's seemingly simple, and takes care of memory management for you, but you still have access to pointers if you want them and can extend the language with its macros. It seems like a language that I'll be able to grow with / pick up complexity as I want it, but by default I'll have concise readable code. What was your take on nim?
* Compiling is pretty fast too (compared to Rust or Haskell).
* It's easy for me to bind to whatever C library I have even if nobody made nice Nim packages for it. This one was important for the project I was working on.
* There is a GC, but if you choose the proper GC it will be based on reference counting (or if you are compiling to JavaScript, it'll use JavaScript's GC). It means I don't have to care about cleaning up resources. My memory may be wrong but I think Nim also tries to remove reference counting checks when it can. I haven't ever checked in the compiled code does it do a good job at this.
* The language rarely complains that something in my code is wrong; there's no borrow checker complaining. Even with little experience I was able to write some quite complicated code. It's like Nim wants to do its best to compile and run my crappy code.
* It's easy to read. Maybe because it looks so much like Python and I have lots of Python experience. Nim does not want to complain about your code unless it has to. Despite being statically typed, you don't have to write type definitions that much.
There are things I don't like as much:
* The story for running threads in Nim is not great. You can run OS-level threads but it's a bit janky (you'll have to now care what data can be shared). It wouldn't stop me from writing multi-threaded software though if I really needed threads.
* The documentation could be a bit better. I think Nim project should take this giant page: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html and reorganize it and make sure the language is easy to read and find stuff. I often have trouble finding documentation on some language feature. I think the project is acknowledging this right in the first paragraph "This document is a draft! Several of Nim's features may need more precise wording. This manual is constantly evolving into a proper specification."
This one is harder to pinpoint into specific examples but the language feels a bit immature. I feel like there's bunch of half-baked features that were thrown in on a whim idea. And obviously the package ecosystem isn't as wide as in more established programming languages. I looked it up and Nim has apparently existed since 2008; I'm sure it used to be way more immature ;)
Despite the negatives, I think Nim is an amazing tinkerer's language. I can very quickly write programs that will be speedy and easy to read. I'm not sure I'd start a very complicated large project in Nim though. I am bullish that Nim will mature and its userbase will grow, fixing some of the warts.
In a few months I plan to take a long vacation and work on a video game with my friend. There is a high chance that I'm going to use Nim for this project; to make something that runs both in browser and also natively.
Good summary, I haven't touched threads but I'd agree with everything else. I'd also add that since the language feels dynamic, I feel like my code is less structured, but I think this might just be because all the boilerplate you have to write in other languages isn't there. So maybe my code is just as unstructured and with nim I can't be fooled by boilerplate into thinking it is.
I've been following the nature of code and making a little 2d platformer at the same time using nim + raylib. Compiling to wasm I found to be even simpler than when doing the same thing with C++. It's really nice being able to compile to native or wasm with a single compiler flag.
