In learning Nim I decided to implement a trivial Socket server, very small, as an example. Its not a useful HTTP server (it just returns a hard coded HTTP response so we can benchmark it using HTTP tools), and its not async - there are other such examples in the Nim examples directory and in its stdlib. No, I wanted to write a more classical threaded socket server to see how easy that is - especially with the new APIs in Nim “bigbreak” - and see how it performs.

The new “bigbreak” branch that will become Nim 0.10.0 soon-ish has a bunch of new stuff in the networking area. Its replacing the single sockets module with a low level rawsockets module, and a higher level net module. And there is a new selectors module that abstracts over different modern IO polling mechanisms. This means that a single API will use epoll on Linux, kqueue on BSD/OSX, old select on the other Unices and IO Completion ports on Windows. At the moment epoll, select on “other Unices” and IO Completion ports works. kqueue is on the todo.

So without further ado…

A year ago I wrote an article trying to round up new languages since year 2000 and what I think of them by just… glancing at them, or otherwise playing with them. I ended up sifting out the 4 most interesting in my not so humble opinion - Go, Rust, Dart and Julia. Now a year has passed and…

I discover that I missed Nim(Nimrod)!

Nim was born somewhere around 2006-ish and is clearly a very serious language to consider, but is going suspiciously under the radar. Having reviewed this language more closely (and still doing so) I can safely say that for me it actually easily tops this list.

I have already posted a few articles about Nim, but this one is meant as a followup to that article trying to make amends :).

NOTE: Technically Nim is still called “Nimrod” up to and including the 0.9.6-release that was done yesterday. But for the upcoming 0.10.0 and onward its Nim. Short and sweet.

Nim has all the language mechanisms needed to smoothly interoperate with C and C++. The rather large collection of wrapped C libraries (and that’s only those in the standard libs) is also a testament to this fact. In this article I explain my personal findings testing out the waters of wrapping a simple C library.

The basic approach to wrapping a simple C library is:

1. Install Nim.
2. Install c2nim using Babel or manually clone c2nim from github and build it.
3. Use c2nim to translate the C header file(s) to a so called Nim wrapper.
4. Make a small test showing it works.
5. Write a so called “impure” intermediary library that uses the wrapper (next article)
6. Make a test green and declare Victory (next article)

Okidoki… (roll up sleeves)

Technically Nim is still called Nimrod up to and including upcoming bugfix version 0.9.6. But then with the next version 0.10.0 it will be just Nim. Currently Nimrod is at 0.9.4. And oh, the current development version is 0.9.5 which will become 0.9.6 when released - the “odd and even” versioning scheme.

Nim can be a bit funky to get started with, typically due to a slight lack of documentation in certain areas that may be obvious to Nimmers (or Nimsters? Knights who say Nim?). This article tries to fill a few mental holes in the first steps.

Also, Nimsters like to do it in Nim - and often the reasons for this are very good, like maintaining portability or minimizing dependencies. Just don’t expect the classic autoconf dance here. As a Smalltalker I am fully versed in the NIH syndrome - which of course doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Thankfully Nimmers also seem to balance it with a strong tradition of standing on the shoulders of giants.

So building Nim isn’t hard, but it’s also not obvious what is going on. There are of course binary installers available too, but hey, we want to hack!

I just posted an article comparing some silly benchmarks between Cog Smalltalk and LuaJIT2. Now… let’s take a look at one of the latest “Cool Kids” on the language front, Nimrod - or as it has been renamed - Nim.