Topic: Programming

One of the most important aspects in a language is how powerful and easy it is to use its collection/container types. At least that is my feeling coming from Smalltalk where the Collection classes and their rather rich protocols are used extensively and also cover String and Array and much more. If you peek into the current leading open source Smalltalk - Pharo - you can see Collection allSubclasses size evaluate to 78. Of course, lots of those are special subclasses and not for general use, but fact remains that a strong language needs a strong library of good collections.

As I described in the earlier posts Nim didn’t support “super calls” when using methods instead of statically bound procs and generics. My article caused a little bit of discussion around this on IRC and Andreas decided to implement the mechanism he already had planned - but had not fully decided a good name for.

In my exploration of Nim the turn has come to see how we can use Nim together with Squeak.

In the previous article when I explored OO mechanisms in Nim I felt I dropped the ball a bit in my Fruit example. This is a followup.

So previously in Nim and OO Part II we saw how we could solve the “super call” issue using only procs and generics in Nim. This means that all code is statically bound.

Nim is presented as an imperative language. And yes, it has some of its roots in the Pascal line of languages, but it also has a set of powerful abstraction mechanisms making it very suitable for object oriented programming. And when I write “object oriented” I am referring to a broader flexible sense of OO in which objects can be formulated with attached behavior, polymorphism between different objects, some kind of reuse model of code (inheritance etc) and some type of dynamic dispatch.

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.

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…

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.

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.