I’ve been researching programming languages to find a good, high level language that compiles to a single binary that is preferably pretty small. After tons of research, I landed on Nim and used it to make a quick txt parser for a project I’m doing.
Nim seems absolutely fantastic. Despite being sold as a systems programming language, it feels like Python without any of its drawbacks (it’s fast, statically typed, etc.) - and the text parser I made is only a 50kb binary!
Has anyone here tried Nim? What’s your experience with it? Are there any hidden downsides aside from being kinda unpopular?
Bonus: I want to give a shoutout to how easy it is to open a text file and parse it line-by-line in this language. Look at how simple and elegant this syntax is:
import os
if paramCount() == 0:
quit("No file given as argument", 1)
let filepath = paramStr(1)
if not fileExists(filepath):
quit("File not found: " & filepath, 1)
for line in lines(filepath):
echo line
I have no idea about Nim but have you checked Go (Golang)? It does the things that you need: single binary, cross compile, easy to learn (except methods on an object are a bit weird at first).
Next to that it is also stable, not dying soon and lots of dependencies to extend the language.
Anyway, if you like Nim, go for it.
Go would probably be my 2nd choice. I haven’t used it much but my initial impression was that it felt kind of boring to write with, and a hello world would end up being a ~2mb binary which put me off a bit. I could give it another shot in the future, but I’m busy enjoying Nim so that probably won’t be any time soon.