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
How is compiling Nim binaries compared to Python? I know on Python, the most common choice is PyInstaller, but that only compiles binaries for the type of system it is executed on.
What the other person said. Cross compiling is as simple as adding a flag assuming you have the dependencies. I tried it and it works well (though my programs are pretty simple). See also the official docs on cross-compiling.
Nim is a compiled language by default, and supposedly cross-compilation is usually as simple as
apt install mingw-w64 nim c -d:mingw myproject.nimthough I haven’t really used it (and my general impression of nim is anything “slightly obscure” like cross-compilation still has a non-zero risk of running into unexpected thorny bugs)