Nim is the most readable language I've ever seen. I've dabbled with Go, but Nim is almost like pseudocodes+types. Highly recommend you take a look and try it out! You can use libraries like https://github.com/planety/prologue or https://github.com/treeform/pixie to create something quickly and fun(compile times are faaasst!).

And Nim does not have a mandatory GC, you can go as low-level as you want, but in case you don't want that you can choose from several great GC's(a capable soft real-time GC and Boehm for example). Or you could combine the best of both worlds and take a look at the shiny fancy ARC/ORC deterministic memory management: https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc...

Looks like you know a bit of Nim. Apart from ecosystem and IDE what are the some of the disadvantages of Nim compared to Go?

* Goroutines are probably a lot more easier to use. Work is being done to make Nim even better in that area: https://github.com/nim-works/cps but don't expect it soonish.

* I feel like Go has less 'edge cases', but the Nim compiler is steadily getting more stable, especially consider it's not backed up by a major company!

* Metaprogramming is really powerful, but not beginner friendly. The documentation says use macros when necessary, but personally I don't think that really happens in practice.

The advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages, especially if you are looking for a clean Go alternative(except maaaaaaybeee web application).

EDIT: my own wishlist, but they aren't relevant compared to Go:

* Better sum types * Builtin pattern matching

I have not done a lot of Go, but I'm pretty sure Nim's concurrency story isn't up there with go, at least not yet.

Nim has other advantages, including great Interop with C or C++ as it compiles to these languages and allows low level, unsafe features like raw pointers when needed.

I have written a bit of both, recently re-wrote a command runner for a side-project https://gitlab.com/jarv/cmdchallenge in Nim and found it very pleasant and much less verbose, which was a nice change from GoLang while keeping type safety. A good example is parsing JSON https://nim-by-example.github.io/json/ as you can do a lot with fewer lines of code. I think the main disadvantage of Nim is that there is less out there in the ecosystem, libraries, and it's more likely you will run into quirks and bugs in the standard library.

I really like the look of Nim but every time I dig into it I find a really strange syntax decision. For example:

> The json module provides the %* operator which is used to create JSON objects

I'm curious what the benefits are here of an operator over some more readable syntax. I have a dislike of languages where ascii noise seems to be favoured over readable english tokens.

This is interesting, especially for a language like Nim that favours familiarity with Python.

Even Rust dropped most of its strange operators/sigils early on in the experimentation phase, because they confused people and Rust doesn't step back from confusing people lightly, haha.

Probably because Rust already has too many ascii symbols! ;) I still get brain mush remapping Rust's & from C's &.

But yah Nim's % is a bit strange at first, but becomes fairly handy in practice when dealing with lots a small bits of JSON. There's the % "to json" operator that mimics the $ "to string" operator for a single value. Then %* was added to handle multiple json items (I read it like apply % to all items). So it has a decent symmetry. Other than % and $ ascii operators are pretty rare in Nim code. Even bitops use or, and, shl, shr, etc over ascii operators.

This way you can write json literals in the code, and it will look just like regular json. For serialization and deserialization stdlib uses `to/load/store` proc names.

  import std/json

  echo %*{
    "key1": "value",
    "key2": 12,
  }

Could have just used a "JSON" keyword instead. Symbolic names are needlessly obscure and unfriendly. Hard to infer meaning, hard to pronounce, hard to search online, etc.

As if "json" is any more searchable. Operators have a meaning that you learn quickly when learning the language. You wouldn't do math with "multiply" instead of "*", so why would you want that in a programming language?

Multiply already has a symbol, and JSON already has a name. Making up a symbol %* to mean JSON is like making up a name Flurb to mean *. Sticking with what already exists seems much simpler.

Because with a keyword the meaning is much more explicit, and I consider that to be more valuable. And I think "*" is a bad example because pretty much everyone who programs already knows it's multiplication.

It might not be the best example, but the point stands. Succinct notation is important. "JSON" instead of "%*" might not be the greatest of examples but still.

Because there's no point in saving three characters (although I'd rather have it be "literal_json" or "inline_json") just to have people memorize what yet another symbol means in a highly specialized context when you could just read the word and be perfectly certain what the code means without looking it up the first time.

Even after the first time symbols have a non-trivial cognitive cost for a lot of people, if not most, all while providing near zero benefit unless your app is pretty much nothing but a bunch of inline json expansions.

Of course it is. It's descriptive and searchable.

Because * / - + is the common ground that essentially everyone is familiar with. And that's about as much math notation as makes sense in general purpose programming languages.

There is only one math but many programming languages. Multiplication is universal and fundamental. Creating JSON objects in nim is the opposite of that.

> no way to narrow it down to meaning the operator

My google insider tells me you can add the word "operator" to your query to do that. Or any other similar word like "keyword" that anyone else thought to call it on stack overflow.

Checkout the newer std/jsonutils: https://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/jsonutils.html

let a = (1.5'f32, (b: "b2", a: "a2"), 'x', @[Foo(t: true, z1: -3), nil])

let j = a.toJson

assert j.jsonTo(typeof(a)).toJson == j

Yeah, I tend to agree with you here especially after a take a break from writing Nim I need to re-learn a lot because it is impossible to hold it in my head for very long.

That's really good point. Also, I don't think it's the only weird operator they introduce in the stdlib without any good reason.

The json module is old and probably wouldn't be designed this way today.

That %* is really strange. Also in the example there is no notion of errors? Nim is exception based?

yes, invalid JSON would raise an exception.

As a python dev, nim was much easier to get into than Go, Rust, or even Zig.

If you squint, it looks like a toddler Python with strong typing, compilation and a few different API, espacially for managing finalisation.

I may be splitting hairs here but Python is actually a strongly typed language. It would be better to say nim has static typing: https://wiki.python.org/moin/Why%20is%20Python%20a%20dynamic...

Check out this Nim talk. Addresses some of your questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2VRuZo2pdA

Thanks I’ll check it out.

Once you're done with that one you can go on with more advanced subjects here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISmv0IGoQQ

From around 1:00 pointers are being discussed.

Cute but disappointing.

Nim has multiple memory management strategies and you can pick any. A few types of garbage collectors, reference counting and manual memory management.[1]

Nim is less verbose than Go and more expressive.

[1] https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html

Nim can be mark/sweep collected but also has a collector called ORC that's reference counting plus a version of the Recyler algorithm for cycle collection.

ORC turns out to be rather nice to use: https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/12/08/introducing-orc.html