Nim

There's a JSON parser in the standard library (http://nim-lang.org/docs/json.html). It works by declaring discriminated union (called enum in Nim) of possible JSON types, declared here: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/master/lib/pure/json.ni... You get a tree of nodes out of the parser and switch (lightweight pattern matching) on each node type. Nim does exhaustiveness checking, so you will never fail to handle some kind of JSON node by accident. You're forced to deal with nulls explicitly, either via pattern matching or convenience functions like `getOrDefault`. It's not as nice as F# Type Providers, but it's workable. You could write something similar to Type Providers with macros (given a schema or sample), but I don't know if someone tried this already. With all the standard operators (like property access/assignment and toString

The whole language is still in development. If there are things you dislike, like the macros, then please submit some bug reports on Github[1] or talk to us on IRC[2] and Gitter[3]. Ideally, help us improve it by submitting pull requests :) 1 - https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues 2 - irc.freenode.net #nim 3 - https://gitter.im/nim-lang/Nim

I agree with a lot of your points, and I can assure you that many of them are on our to do list including removal of the need for forward declarations. However, I very much disagree with your assessment of Nim's macros, what exactly makes them "really really clumsy?" I have worked with them a lot and they are very powerful (if a bit verbose), despite this I was able to write a fairly nice implementation of async await and just last weekend I made writing both synchronous and asynchronous IO code much easier using a ``multisync`` macro[1]. This only took me ~100 lines[2]. 1: Still a WIP, but already reduces code duplication A LOT: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/devel/lib/pure/httpclie... 2: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/devel/lib/pure/asyncmac...

https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/issues/936 still open :-(

This is why I made a BASIC-like language with 4GL-style utility functions that extracted to C. I knew effects of each one. BASIC didn't have C's issues and compiled pretty directly. Compiled fast, too. Not recommending this route today as I just happened to start with BASIC. More like combining a simple, easy-to-compile, safe-by-default language w/out GC and with macros that extracts to portable C. Should make programming in C easier while providing all the benefits of C as my system did. I've been eyeballing Nim language for this since HN commenters pointed out it's close to the goal already: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-C-programmers Someone might even be using a subset of it as a high-level C language. I'd be interested to know if anyone reading is doing something like that. Plus any other language besides Nim that can

> Nim is frustrating I have used Nim heavily for more than a year now, and it turned out to be the most productive language I have every used. Nim could be considered a modern Lisp with infix notation and Python like syntax with native C performance. The macro system is incredibly well designed and easy to handle. I also tried Rust, and it turned out to be much more complicated and time consuming. I would use it for systems programming only. Redox is the only reason for me to learn Rust. > The one thing is its rule for when two identifiers are the same. First it looked strange to me as well. However there are actually good reasons to avoid case sensitivity. http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-case-for-case-insensitivity... As for the user_sort and use_rsort example, such semantic errors can easily be fixed by qualification (a.user_sort and b

Just realised that I forgot to answer one of your questions. > how best can we help Nim to move towards that goal right now? There are many ways. One way of course is to use Nim, test it, give us feedback, write Nim libraries and tell other people about it. But the best way is to get directly involved in Nim's development on Github, help us fix bugs, discuss the future direction of the language and help us implement new features. Here is a list of "Easy" bugs to get you started: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/labels/Easy Another alternative is donations. Nim accepts donations through Bountysource[1], and Gratipay[2]. 1 - https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nim 2 - https://gratipay.com/nim/

> Does Nim have something like PEP-8? https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Style-Guide-for-Nim-Cod...

The garbage collector looks to be written in Nim: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/devel/lib/system/gc.nim

Linked at the bottom of the homepage: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Roadmap

How about Nim? [1] [2] To me it is in many ways a "nicer and safer C". Sure it's not as mature as C, but what is? What it does have going for it is portability (it compiles to C so it shares C's portability), a soft real-time GC which can be manually controlled [3], generics, AST macros and much more. 1: http://nim-lang.org 2: https://github.com/nim-lang/nim 3: http://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html#realtime-support