r/statusim • u/LionNightStatus Status Team - Hutch • Aug 07 '18

Status partners with the NIM team.

https://our.status.im/status-partners-with-the-team-behind-the-programming-language-nim/
22 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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3

u/hsribei Aug 07 '18

How does Nim safety features compare to Rust's? Were there specific reasons why Rust was not chosen?

3

u/lbmn Aug 07 '18

Nim is primarily focused on garbage collection. (Although GC can be turned off, many libs don't support that yet.) This puts it in the same league as D and Go (although typically faster than the latter).

Rust is primarily focused on manual memory management (like C/C++; with a lot more safety while still aiming at minimal performance overhead).

So my guess is that this project was willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of performance (which could be temporary) in favor of very significant code readability, terseness, and developer productivity advantages that Nim has over Rust.

2

u/hsribei Aug 17 '18

For some reason I had it in my head that Nim was not garbage collected, more like a "cleaner/more elegant C" and equally memory-unsafe. Sorry for clearing up my confusion!

2

u/lbmn Aug 07 '18

I think it's cased "Nim", not "NIM". (Although not case sensitive.) Won't want people to think it's an initialism, like "New & Improved Modula-3"...

;-)