It's true that compiler developers like krux, Clyybber, saem migrated to nimskull, I don't disagree.
> but there are only a handful of folks remaining that have been around for more than a year or two
But I totally disagree with your false statements about "senior" community members (those who don't do compiler development) migrating to nimskull - this is not true at all. There are a lot of "senior" people left in the Nim community.
And again, nimskull isn't a "silver bullet" either. It has the flexibility to change major things in the language just because it's a hard fork and almost no one (except people who develop it) uses it for real projects, whereas Nim has an actual userbase that doesn't want their code to be broken, especially considering the fact that nimskull has already removed a lot of the stdlib libraries, especially async (which there is no alternative to in Nimskull).
Are there experienced programmers in the Nim community, sure? Are they able to fix Nim with Nim's leadership in place? Doubtful in my mind based on history.
Also, I apologize if it seemed like I was evangelizing Nimskull or suggesting folks switch to it. I agree it is in no shape to serve a replacement for Nim presently, and may not ever be.
I'm sure fusion could have been handled better, and for 2021 the roadmap was a bit hazy, but I can't think of any other big missteps. Araq, dom, PMunch, and other senior folks are in the forms helping people and answering questions every day, and my interactions with all of them has been very positive. The big post 1.0 feature was arc/orc, and that was very well communicated. Bugs are being fixed, useful new features are being added, and future plans are being discussed in the open.
And Nim itself is great. The "if it compiles, it works" factor is high, yet I almost never feel like the compiler is fighting me. Simple things are simple (I'm teaching it to a group of 12 year olds), it's incredibly flexible, it's fast, and it's suitable for almost any sort of problem. There's nothing else like it, and I expect I'd continue using it for at least a decade even if it switched into maintenance mode tomorrow. I think it will take at least that long for something better to come along.
The point is the compiler has more and more cruft that makes it increasingly more complex and increasingly unreliable. It also makes it so that bugs are harder and harder to fix. Not to mention that it's basically impossible to track what is going on with the language at any given point in time because there is no roadmap or updated status. It also doesn't help that certain folks like to create ten GitHub issues and RFCs for every perceived slight in the language.
Once again, the problem boils down to a complete lack of leadership or interest in running the show - and instead of empowering the community to make that happen, leadership sits back and acts like everything is great and perfect and pats themselves on the back. When someone complains that it is not, leadership finds a way to defend itself and turn sentiment against the person complaining. It happens over and over again and it's why Nim isn't a success story like languages that actually have empowered communities and leaders that are interested in leading and not just collecting book revenues / making .io games, etc... while actively gatekeeping those who would like to get involved in making things better.
> how much frustration you will encounter fighting the compiler and broken / under-specified language features and semantics might be a turn-off.
unless you limittest generics, most people wont even encounter this.
> My advice would be to look elsewhere.
that would imply that there is a better alternative
I don't think my totally normal usage of generics for type safety could be called "stretching the limits." My usage of generics includes using a parameter [V] for OpenGL meshes to introduce type safety with the vertex type. I'm pretty sure that's perfectly normal?
Recently one of my friends tried compiling my project - pan[1] on Windows, and for whatever reason - it doesn't work! stating that it "cannot instantiate 'V'", whatever that means. I've had this error annoy me many times before, but I have no clue what triggers it or how to reproduce it reliably. Call this a 'stable implementation.'
[1]: https://github.com/liquidev/pan [2]: https://github.com/liquidev/aglet
Generally it's not usually an issue with Nim's generics itself, but rather bad error message. Definitely an area for improvement IMHO. Though having used a fair bit of C++ templates over the years, I still find the Nim errors much more tractable after a bit of experience.
There _are_ a few broken limits of Nim's generics, but they are things pushing the type system to a limit.
A have a sinking feeling such language exists and is called "C".
It’s like the “incredible journey” term for companies that get swallowed whole by other companies, leaving their customers to dry.
Contrast this to, say, Zig, their road-maps and community structure is light years ahead.
It's not a coincidence you see the same name pop up, every time someone gets bullied out of the discord.
Have you ever dealt with someone that constantly lies and misrepresents your opinions to make you look like a villain? Have ever gotten frustrated, because the person you're arguing with is constantly shifting the goalpost to their benefit? Have you ever said something needlessly rude out of frustration? How would YOU react, if after dealing with all this disingenuous bs, YOU get told to watch your tone or you get banned for being toxic?
The justifications after a ban always make logical sense, true. But if you read through the logs with even a little bit of empathy, it becomes clear very quickly who the toxic person in those interactions is.
Edit: I'm not talking about a specific person getting banned. This happened numerous times, including newcomers.
I'm not even including the horrible software they've authored and cargo culted into the language's ecosystem and tooling. That should be enough of an offense to be removed from any decision-making role.
He didn't cargo cult his software into the ecosystem. He made the ecosystem. Nimble is the package manager because there was no package manager until dom wrote one. Jester is the default web framework because it was first, and despite its age it's still pretty good. Same for choosenim. And asyncdispatch. And all of the other tools/libraries that he wrote.
Obviously writing some early software doesn't give him a free pass. I could understand the attitude if he was a jerk, but I've never seen him be anything but helpful.
Try to advocate for replacing any of dom's tools / software packages and see what happens. Try to advocate for taking Nim in a direction counter to what dom perceives as the right one, even though they no longer contribute to the language anymore besides telling people to fix their broken software they're no longer willing to maintain, or to throw their weight around in RFCs / IRC.
This is the type of insecurity and paranoia one can expect to find when hanging out in Nim discord.
1) Nim's leadership is awful and has always been historically. Those in charge of managing the community are more interested in their personal reputation's and resumes than they are actually contributing working software to the language's ecosystem. Even the BDFL treats Nim like their own personal compiler R&D playground. There are so many broken features in Nim which never see the light of day or never get removed.
2) Continuing to expand on the point above, the Nim compiler has become insanely difficult to work on. As more and more half-baked features have been added to the language, the situation has only worsened. There are many would-be contributors who have come into the community only to leave completely frustrated or appalled by the lack of interest in improving the situation from those leading the community.
3) The development path is driven by leadership and not the community, and leadership has no plan. This was extremely evident last year when Araq and others were asked for a roadmap for Nim and they admitted to not having one, and basically wrote one up in a forum thread. Araq and dom96 and a few others, especially those who have been brave enough to actually deploy Nim code in production (looking at you status.im) tend to dictate what gets worked on or fixed. There is no coordination amongst folks working on initiatives. You can look at the `fusion` project, which was started by Nim's leadership, drew contributors in, and then was abandoned by leadership while maintainers were left on the hook to keep things afloat until they too dumped the project.
Things have gotten so bad, that a hard fork has been in development since last year, and many of the more senior community members or those who have been around for a bit have migrated there: https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull
Nim's community now consists of mostly new members or folks who weren't really active in it before, but maybe used Nim. Of course, the leadership remains in place, but there are only a handful of folks remaining that have been around for more than a year or two. Mostly those who bit the bullet on using Nim in production or built large projects with Nim and are stuck maintaining them.
My advice would be to look elsewhere.