pixie

> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written... Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme Thank you for all the things you've made for Nim!

The proof is in the link! > Fast compile times: a full compiler rebuild takes ~12s (Rust: 15min, gcc: 30min+, clang: 1hr+, Go: 90s) [2]. The compiler is really big and self-hosted too. For large nim projects check out: https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer or https://github.com/treeform/pixie (personal faves).

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...

Here's an example of the Python produced by Genny: https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python/blob/master/src/pix... That Python is the output from this file: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi... This is very new stuff for us but we really like the idea that we can generate comfortable bindings for many languages and never have to worry about method signatures or comments or default values getting out of sync with the C / shared lib interface.

For those using Python, we just got our Python bindings for Pixie up onto pip. Repo here https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python It's extremely fresh but our tests are working so consider giving it a try. For those interested in Nim's meta-programming, we're generating those Python bindings for Pixie from our Nim code using https://github.com/treeform/genny here https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi... More languages in the works.

Dlang's betterC would be a good option for just a better-than-C language but looks like it doesn't support D's standard library [1]. That'd mean being stuck with plain C container libraries. :/ Personally, I was impressed by an approach taken by the authors of Pixie (a fast 2d library like Cairo) [2]. They created a "library wrapper" generator for Nim code that supports creating libraries Python, Node, C, and Nim itself that they call Genny [3]. Haven't tried it but being able to use Nim and it's ref based gc but still export to nice API's in other languages is fantastic. Pixie's aim is to be a Cairo alternative so it makes sense they'd need this. I hope the approach takes off. Usually writing any cross language API's is a lossy operation. Here's a sample of the API definition: exportObject Matrix3: constructor: matrix3