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0 pointspron5y ago0 comments

> Are there features that Nim implements which go against this premise? if so, what are they? :)

Nim has generics (plus concepts), templates, and macros. Zig has just comptime, through which it achieves all those goals (minus some macro capabilities that it deems harmful anyway) with just one, very simple, cohesive construct. You could argue on whether you like this or not, but you can't argue that Zig's approach isn't fundamentally more minimal. Zig is a language you can reasonably fully learn in one day; I don't think you could say the same about Nim.

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Also, note another remarkable feature. One could define a language called Zig' with the following properties:

1. Every well-formed Zig program is a well-formed Zig' program (i.e. Zig' accepts all Zig programs, potentially more).

2. Every Zig program has the same semantics as the identical program when interpreted in Zig'.

This means that to analyse the semantics of a Zig program you can pretend it's a Zig' program; in fact, you don't need to create an interpreter for Zig', you can just pretend it exists. Why would you want to do that? Because Zig' is simpler. How? Here's the kicker: Zig' ignores comptime completely. It is a very simple, optionally-typed, dynamic language with reflection.

In other words, to analyse the semantics of a Zig program you can forget about comptime and pretend it can do everything at runtime (and treat comptime as a pure semantics-preserving optimisation).

This is not true for languages with macros, as they are not "erasable".

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mratsim5y ago· 2 in thread

> Zig has just comptime, through which it achieves all those goals (minus some macro capabilities that it deems harmful anyway) with just one, very simple, cohesive construct. You could argue on whether you like this or not, but you can't argue that Zig's approach isn't fundamentally more minimal. Zig is a language you can reasonably fully learn in one day; I don't think you could say the same about Nim.

"some macros" are downplaying Nim macros, it's like saying Lisp has some AST rewrite capabilities.

Nim macros goals are two-folds:

1. adding functionality to the language without baking it in the compiler. A prime example is ``async``, ``async`` including a nice async/await syntax can be completely implemented as a library without reserving keywords to do things like `pub async fn`.

2. Automating away boilerplate.

From what I understood, Zig comptime is only about making compile-time function evaluation first-class.

pronOP5y ago

Yes, plus introspection. Zig tries very, very hard to avoid macros, so macros are an anti-feature from Zig's perspective. That you could do what Zig finds important for its domain, like conditional compilation, writing a typesafe println, generic types, and generating pretty-printing routines all in simple Zig without macros is a cool discovery. I don't know if it's true, but I think the desire to avoid macros at all cost was a bigger motivation for Zig's design than, say, generic types.

In other words, there is a capability here that Nim really, really wants, and that Zig really, really doesn't want, so on that front they are not competing in their designs.

gw5y ago

I do love how zig's comptime naturally led to generics without extra syntax. But after using nim i'm convinced that macros make even more sense for systems programming. They can even affect performance -- nim's macros can generate types that would be difficult to write by hand.

I also take issue with your statement that zig is "more minimal" since that only applies to the user's perspective -- from the compiler's perspective, macros make a language far more minimal. But i vaguely recall already discussing this distinction with you so i don't want to rehash it.

At any rate i will definitely be paying attention to andrew's progress, he has a really clear vision.

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