For me, Julia completely addresses the 2 language problem. In practice I think it now simply needs a stronger ecosystem, better static analysis, and bug fixes, but I am very happy with the language design.
Their goal is to get Eth2.0 (and 1.0) running on very low resource environments such as raspberry pi and turnstiles.
What this should tell you is that:
* Nim is close to the metal enough to run with high performance and low resources.
* In a cutting edge research arena, where the math is still being decided, Nim allows such rapid prototyping that the team is on par with much larger teams in much more established languages.
* All the tools required to build an ethereum platform are present and running, such as security, encryption, and networking such as devp2p. Here's their eth library docs for some of the contributions: https://nimbus-libs.status.im/lib/nim-eth/
Status is pretty dedicated to open source, and whilst they're the biggest patreon donor, the Nim team is completely autonomous.
vec[3_s & 4]
(C++ doesn't have a ':' operator, you'll need to use some other symbol.)
Nim had the following appeal for us:
- Ethereum research is done in Python, we actually started our code with a tool called py2nim to convert a 50k lines Python codebase to Nim in less than a month (and remove cruft for 3 months but that's another story).
- Nim allows us to use a single language for research and production: the Python syntax, and the fast compilation speed are very helpful. In particular researchers found the Nim codebase easy to debug as the overhead vs the Python spec was quite low (and the Python spec is using types with mypy)
- Nim has a easy C FFI and is one of the rare languages that can directly use C++ libraries, including header-only template heavy libraries.
- Nim allows tight control over memory allocation, stack vs heap objects, has support for Android and iOS and very low-memory devices as well.
- Nim also can be very high-level
- Nim is as fast as C and can resort to inline C, inline C++ or inline assembly when needed. (inline javascript or Objective C are possible as well)
- You can produce WASM code via clang, emscripten, binaryen, there is even a Nes emulator demo from 2015 running in Nim compiled to WASM here: https://hookrace.net/nimes/
- Nim has a strong type-system, including generics and type-level integers, boolean and enums.
- Nim has probably the best compile-time capabilities of all languages. I'm writing a deep-learning compiler in Nim macros. Someone wrote a Cuda code generator in Nim macros, and the code generation is extremely nice to write a VM, an emulator or any kind of assemblers as you don't need to use an intermediate step to generate your opcode tables or generate your functions from that table.
Now on a personal note, I use Nim to write a deep learning framework similar to PyTorch or Tensorflow.
I think it's the best language to solve the 2-language problem, i.e. write research in Python, R or Matlab and production in C, C++ or Fortran.
The operator overloading or even operator creation is very useful. The macros allow me to have a slicing syntax similar to Numpy, something impossible in C++. Compilation speed is very nice as a developer, I don't know how people deal with waiting for C++ CI.
I reimplemented a matrix multiplication with performance similar to handwritten assembly BLAS from OpenBLAS and MKL in pure Nim so I'm not worried about performance as well.
Now I'm onto refactoring the backend with a proper compiler (similar to Halide but since it will be macro-based, there won't be the 2-stage compilation issue)