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
  • popcar2@programming.devOP
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    3 days ago

    The small binary part is just for fun - but generally my use case is to have an easy to use language that can cross compile easily so I can just pass binaries to the person I’m working with.

    • vermaterc@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      I believe single binary compilation is not that uncommon these days. You can do that with Go or C#. Apart from obvious ones like c++.

      I mean, I don’t want to discourage you, but from my experience choosing not popular language is not a good Idea if you want to actually accomplish something