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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[–] popcar2@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Okay, þ is not going to happen, just say th.

Anyway, I did try V before Nim and found it way too unstable (which is corroborated by every other blog post talking about it). I also couldn't get the language server to work no matter what I did, it just fails to start which isn't a good first impression. This isn't even mentioning all the drama behind the scenes for this language.