Re:Zig, parser combinators, and why they're awesome
by cb321 on Thursday March 11, 2021 @10:20AM
(#26424918)
Something often overlooked in comparisons is "The many dimensions of beat". In some ways ORC probably already beats the best JVM while in others it may never. The best benchmark is, as always, one's own code. :-) I've found Nim quite efficient, though.
The one time when I had trouble with Nim's GC perf was years ago implementing Wolfe Garbe's Symmetric Delete spell checking algorithm [0]. Even then, it worked with nim c --gc:boehm but blew up with others. So, there was nothing stopping me from doing it in Nim. This was my initial "in volatile RAM" solution before I went to a fully persistent on-disk memory mapped solution [1]. SymDel is an algorithm particularly demanding of prog.lang run-time basics as explained in that link. I've come to think of it as a good stress test. { Not the only one, of course :-) } I wonder how well Java's GCs would fare.
From your linked article:
> it turns out there are lots of ideas that the GC research overlooked. Exciting times for Nim!
I wish them luck, this is a field where great progress has been made over the last decade, hopefully more to come. If they really can beat the JVM head-on, that would be very impressive, especially if they do so while using C as an intermediate language.