Exciting to see ORC being the focus for 2.0! We’re using ARC (pure reference counting, minus the cycle collector) for our embedded firmware, and it’s been pretty excellent. Sink and Lent are great, as is the adoption of destructors/RAII-like approaches. Combined with Nims awesome compile time and meta programming features (for truely zero cost abstractions — nothing better than have the compiler help us write correct firmware code and have all those fancy types and checks disappear in the C output!), it’s been awesome. There’s some rough edges here and there, mostly due to the interplay of ESP-IDF having a pretty buggy malloc implementation, but being able to ask Nim to expandArc and tell me where the destructors are being put to track down accidental cycles or leaks has been handy — and it’ll only get better and easier as Nim adopts even more powerful tools :)

It’s a remarkably pragmatic language in a lot of ways, at least in my opinion. Can’t wait for the rest of the talks!