this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Programming

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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
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[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 10 points 3 days ago (21 children)

it feels like Python without any of its drawbacks

Uses whitespace for code blocks though. I figured we've moved past that.

[–] Joker@piefed.social 6 points 3 days ago (8 children)

I thought we moved past that complaint 20 years ago. It’s not as if you won’t indent your code anyway.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 days ago (7 children)

We moved past it because everone realized it was a stupid idea. Rust, go, etc abandoned it and rightly so. It causes more problems than it's worth.

[–] Joker@piefed.social -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Meanwhile, Python is one of the most widely used programming languages.

[–] jaemo@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If a zillion people do a silly thing, it's still a silly thing.

[–] Joker@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The point is it's a dumb, old argument that apparently hasn't affected adoption of the language. Python is immensely useful and significant whitespace is a big, fat nothingburger. It's just silly to still be debating it after all these years. The time for that was like 30 years ago.

Yeah, it's like going to a restaurant and only judging the food by the restaurant's decor. It is arguing something that doesn't matter and most people get over it after they've worked in a number of languages.

It just doesn't matter and instead adds noise to the language feedback loop for something that isn't changing and isn't a problem to begin with.

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