i don't understand why people make these kinds of criticisms. everyone already understand that the assumption for a new language that the ecosystem won't be as rich. you're basically saying something akin to "x high school football player is much worse than y professional football player in a professional game". of course. judge them in context.
Go has a wealthy patron and a "rockstar" principal dev so it wins the popularity contest. Vue has also been playing third fiddle to the big boys for some time but people are coming around. There is no reason why Nim can't have its moment in the sun too.
>People have to actually use the language, and this is a practical concern.
do they? is it in the rules of building languages and ecosystems that every new language has to be production ready from day 1? it is also possible that you can use it for hobby projects and that that's sufficient merit to talk about it and have posts about it too.
What on earth are we comparing when discussing Nim vs. other languages, if not the language itself, in practice? Are we just discussing how good you feel about it?
My point is, this is an actual deficiency that you need to consider when evaluating Nim, that isn't just a function of the language being new. For example, Zig is another option which puts any C libraries at your fingertips, without requiring bindings. If Nim had better interop (not just relatively good, but zero effort) this would no longer be a concern and you wouldn't need all of your libraries to be in Nim.
Not sure what you're getting at. People in this thread are discussing what it's like to use Nim, including its ecosystem, vs. other languages and ecosystems. You don't seem to have anything substantive to add to that other than that Nim is "new" which as I mentioned isn't relevant to the experience of actually using it.
Objectively, it's very hard to say. But practically, yes. Smart people building critical systems do not run to relatively untested languages, no matter how good they may look.
But... there's a loooooot of "high school level" applications out there in the world. And the way a language graduates up to the higher classes is getting tried out in the "lower criticality" systems, and getting experience.
I wouldn't try to build an S3 competitor in Nim right now, no matter how good it may look. But even a company building an S3 competitor in some other language could still have tons of other places Nim would be a fit.
> Smart people building critical systems do not run to relatively untested languages, no matter how good they may look.
Except they do, if the new untested language is qualitatively better than the old one. For example, a critical crypto algorithm in Firefox is written in F* and compiled to C: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2017/09/13/verified-crypto... . The new implementation is formally verified free of certain classes of bugs (like buffer overflows), and significantly faster than the hand-written C implementation.
