nimler

It's one reason I prefer lighter languages for NIF's. My personal preference is to use Nim and Nimler [1]. It generally compiles quicker than Rust while providing most of the same benefits. To be fair compiling a small Rust library doesn't take too much time. Especially compared to the performance numbers from those Rust NIFs! 1: https://github.com/wltsmrz/nimler

You can also write Elixir/BEAM NIF extensions in Nim and Zig as well using Nimler or Zigler, resp [1,2]. Also I’ve found writing native extensions for the BEAM is simpler than many other dynamic languages since it relies on immutable data. It’s roughly the same as just a function to deserialize/serialize data with some extra references to GC’ed data. Especially with dirty “NIF”s (they allow the functions to run for as long as they want without messing up the BEAM scheduler). 1: https://github.com/wltsmrz/nimler 2: https://github.com/ityonemo/zigler

Second that, I find Nim fun to program. Not sure exactly why.. Perhaps, it‘a a bit of the feel of the old Python 2 days, but with better package management, less OO, and static binaries. Or it has more advanced abilities that solve annoying points with static languages like C++ via proper macros. Crystal looks nice too, but I want code that compiles to C/C++, not llvm for embedded work. Not sure about Crystal, but I’ve been able to find all the packages I needed for embedded and even some ML work. That Nim can wrap C/C++ libraries really helps there, otherwise it’d be a pain. For example I wanted to load PNG images, well someone wrapped a C library [1]. Or to create Elixir NIFs (with exception safety!) [2]. Generally if there’s a C/C++ package it only takes a few hours to wrap and use. Nim has some annoying parts, like understanding the r

You might consider Elixir for scripting / systems language as well. LiveView is lightweight but allows amazingly quick Web-dev. Nim incorporates some Pascal concepts too. There's also a nice package to write native functions for Elixir in Nim [1]. 1: https://github.com/wltsmrz/nimler