Now there are billions of lines of python in production. But it wasn't so long ago that it seemed like the entire industry was going to completely standardise on C++, and if you wanted a picture of your future, it would be grinding away debugging buffer overflows and thread lockups - forever.

I kind of object to this take.

Nobody's talking about porting billions of lines of code, for all we know it's just for personal projects, or a learning experience.

This kind of replies is like killing an idea before it's even started, smells like the sunk cost fallacy.

OTOH I do understand the weight of a currently existing corpus in production, evidence is the ton of COBOL code still running. But still, your reply kind of sucks.

> Nobody's talking about porting billions of lines of code, for all we know it's just for personal projects, or a learning experience.

am i the only person in the room that can read tone? please tell me what is the force of this statement in what i've responded:

> If you want static compilation, use a language and libraries built with that assumption as a ground rule.

is this an imperative only for hobbyists? not sure.

> This kind of replies is like killing an idea before it's even started, smells like the sunk cost fallacy.

there is no idea - that's exactly my whole point. tear it down and build it again is not an idea.

I finished the rewrite in just a few months and have been happily maintaining it for two years and extending it with powerful features it never had before, partially thanks to optimized native binary speed, partially thanks to the ludicrous compatibility of a musl-libc static binary. The rewrite is the backend foundation of a web product stack that is best-in-category.

I didn't choose Nim because I was an evangelist; I had only toyed with it twice before. After much evaluating (and wrestling an ultra-frustrating previous attempt at a Rust rewrite my predecessor had tried), Nim surfaced as the best tool for the specific job. And it still is. It doesn't have to be our entire product stack; it's doing a small subset of very important jobs, doing them well, and is invoked by other languages that do their jobs better as web servers and such. A modular stack helps each language and tool shine where it works best.