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nim-lang
Nim
Nim2013–2026
nim-lang / Nim

Nim

Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).

Languages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
100Distinct people
162Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
18.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I see Go and OCaml recommended to people fed up with Python's lack of static typing, and I just cringe. I love experimenting with programming languages, and Go seems to be…

Cyther606 used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year162 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-08-26 07:15:53 UTC to 2026-08-14 22:20:35 UTC.

01020302013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 2 submissions, 14 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 3 submissions, 18 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 26 mentions; 3 submissions, 23 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 3 submissions, 11 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16214
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21318
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC26323
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14311
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

162 sources
prirun·Aug 14, 2026
OrderedTable in Nim appears to be the same and still have O(n) performance. On a delete, an entirely new table is constructed. https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/devel/lib/pure/collecti... I didn't know about Nimony and just took a look. https://github.com/nim-lang/nimony/blob/master/lib/std/table... OrderedTable is now a synonym for Table, ie, both are ordered. To delete a key, the key is looked up to get an index position x in a Seq, the Seq entries after x are shifted left, the Seq is trimmed of the last element, and then the entire table is rehashed because shifting the Seq invalidates the previous hash codes. The performance is better than Nim OrderedTables because at least an entirely new table isn't created, and it probably works fine for small tables, but it still isn't O(1). The performance would be similar to removing an i
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tem from a single-threaded sorted list: most painful to remove the 1st element, least painful to remove the last element, but then you still have to rehash the entire table.
In Mojo 1.0
tinfoilhatter·Nov 1, 2025
> I have to challenge this, because for the last couple years, there have been almost no incidents or drama. Moderation was almost exclusively dealing with spam messages. I think, on the forum, a couple posts were closed because of heated or offtopic discussions. But in all cases, participants were agreeing with the decision of mods (you can see them leaving a 'like' on mod's message). Or we could look at the project's contributor graph: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/graphs/contributors instead of likes on moderator's posts on the forums > I know that some of people that left were also the ones causing problems with moderation and being toxic. I don't want anyone to draw strong conclusions, but Nim community was much healthier and friendly after the fork people and certain moderator leaving the project. What definition of the words toxi
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c, healthy, and friendly are you using? > This is just false. You can see Araq answering the noob questions on the forum all the time. He might be not the best person to do that, because his answers on the short side. I believe, noobs often need more context, examples and explanations than he's providing. But it's thought and effort that counts. Some people even hate when you treat them as complete beginner and try to nourture them common CS knowledge. Maybe if he's not the best person to do that, he shouldn't be doing it? You seem to just be playing devil's advocate here, instead of offering any real example that contradicts my claims.
In Nim 2.2.6
cb321·Oct 4, 2025
I use tcc with Nim all the time and it yields almost interpreted REPL-like code-iteration speed (like 100-500ms per compile-link - almost ENTER-see-results). As a warning, you need to be sure --lineDir=off in your nim.cfg or config.nims (to side-step the infinite loop mentioned in https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/23488). You may also need to --tlsEmulation=on if you do threads and you may want to --passL=-lm. tcc itself is quite fast. Faster for me than a Perl5 interpreter start-up for me (with both on trivial files). E.g., on an i7-1370P: tim "tcc -run /t/true.c" "/bin/perl</n" 58.7 +- 1.3 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead 437 +- 14 μs tcc -run /t/true.c 589 +- 10 μs /bin/perl</n { EDIT: /n -> /dev/null and true.c is just "int main(int ac,char*av){return 0;}". }
In Zig builds are getting faster
archargelod·Jul 30, 2025
Using fully qualified imports is a Python tradition. Python doesn't have a notion of public/private symbols (no, "__" prefix does absolutely nothing). It also doesn't have a good type system, so it can't have function overloading. This is why you're required to qualify almost all imports in Python, to avoid name clashes. Nim doesn't have this problem and also "fixes" a lot of other shortcomings[1] of Python.[2] [1] - https://github.com/yugr/python-hate [2] - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programm...
In Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language
cb321·Jul 2, 2025
> look at the major standard libraries for hash tables I don't know what would count as "major", but at least to me "major" does not imply "good". As I mentioned, this idea is ancient (the point of citing Knuth from over half a century ago - that was me, not @dwattttt) but also weakly disseminated. In said weakness, it may well be uncommon in "major" impls, but that merely recapitulates my point. Honestly, that and the resizing thing was such weird argumentation that I didn't take the time to reply. One does usually resize on insert to keep things sparse as @dwattttt mentioned. With deletions, might want to resize after delete to keep things dense which could help if you iterate over the table much after deleting a lot of it. That is not a cost you would ever pay if you don't delete. So, ability to delete is still something insert-o
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nly workloads don't pay anything for. Moving past the off-point qualification of "major"-ness & weird resize points, if you are actually curious about more details how this can work and want a concrete example, you could look at the Nim stdlib Table implementation: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/fbdc9a4c19aafc25937aaa5... or you could read the Knuth subsection that I referenced, but Knuth uses a rather archaic linear probing to smaller indices which probably seems unnatural to modern readers. There is nothing special added to the insert-only data/pathways to support deletes either in that Nim code or the Knuth. Deletes done this way can benefit from saving integer hash codes (and that happens to be done in the Nim example), but so do all finds via prefix compare & resizes by avoiding hash(). So, in the space-time trade-off analysis of "is saving hash codes worth it?", delete finds & backshifts are just one more part of some workload. This is "deletes in a workload impact space-time trade-offs", though, not "ability to delete costs insert-only workloads" which seems to be the contentious point.
In I write type-safe generic data structures in C
cb321·May 17, 2025
BTW, there's some analysis of some of the hash functions you mentioned (pjw, FNV1A, or djb) over here https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/23678 - just in-page search for "pjw" to find a table. Really only 1 cpu & 1 C compiler (though there was some solicitation of more breadth). Those byte-at-a-time hashers really are pretty slow unless your strings are very short (like under 3..6 bytes - which, hey, they might be!). Further down there are some plots/graphs with a little more compiler/cpu variety but fewer hash functions. Kind of a long thread, but maybe informative. Anyway, pictures are worth thousands of words and all that. EDIT: and FWIW, there's even some preliminary analysis of this new rapid hash TFA is about towards the bottom, but it may be an older, slower version.
In New high-quality hash measures 71GB/s on M4
archargelod·Nov 23, 2024
With function overloading, templates and late static binding. You just use a `hash` function in your library code and user has to implement a version of it that accepts the Foo type. To resolve the scope problem, Nim uses templates[1] and a `mixin`[2] statement to bind user-defined hash procedure. 0 - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/lib/pure/collections/tables.... 1 - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/652edb229ae3ca736b19474... 2 - https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#generics-mixin-stateme...
In Traits are a local maximum
cb321·Oct 9, 2024
Possibly relevant -- Nim has a compile-time warning for bare exceptions, initially enabled by default [1]. I think Nim-core changed their mind about this being a good idea a few months later: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/21728 (though the message still says "The bare except clause is deprecated" if you do compile with --warning:BareExcept:on - I think the urge to actually deprecate has gone away). I think for Python, rather than breaking bajillions of unpublished lines of code they should start with a more tentative & minimally invasive environment var/CLI switch opt-out warning that says something like "may be deprecated" where even the Python ./configure script lets you opt out at Python interpreter-compile-time. Measure the scope of the porting problem for a few years before trying to decide on The Plan for something that mig
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ht be too disruptive. [1] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/commit/91ce8c385d4ccbaab8048...
In PEP 760: No more bare excepts
archargelod·Sep 9, 2024
Nim [0] IMO has syntax that's better than Python, while having a performance of C. See "Nim for Python Programmers" [1] for detailed comparison. Small example of Nim code (from relevant article [2]): var gc = 0 var total = 0 for line in lines("orthocoronavirinae.fasta"): if line[0] == '>': # ignore comment lines continue for letter in line: if letter == 'C' or letter == 'G': gc += 1 total += 1 echo(gc / total) [0] - https://nim-lang.org [1] - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programmers [2] - https://benjamindlee.com/posts/2021/why-i-use-nim-instead-of-python-for-data-proce…
In Rust for the small things? but what about Python?

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