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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.

In the open source Smalltalk community we have a pretty fast VM these days - its called Cog and is written by the highly gifted and experienced Eliot Miranda who also happens to be a really nice guy! Cog is fast and its also still improving with some more developers joining recently.

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.

It starts off with Cincom, Arden Thomas presenting their roadmap. He had a slide mentioning Jules Verne and I must ask him if he is aware of the influence from the books of Jules Verne - as Dan has explained, the ballon and the island in the classic Smalltalk logo comes from the Mysterious Island book.

Day three blurred a bit for me - lots of mingling and hacking intermixed with some nice presentations, but I missed quite a lot, I admit, like the presentation on new native UI stuff in VisualWorks and the tODE stuff from Dale Henrichs.

Another day in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

Here we go! Time for a week of Smalltalking fun in IAE Universite Savoie Mont-Blanc in Annecy.

I am sitting in a gate on an airport waiting to go to ESUG so I felt I should finally get this article out the door. In a presentation earlier this year I asked what has happened in the programming language area since year 2000? Not much I felt and I couldn’t really name any interesting new language when thinking about it. But then I decided to look more closely and I can conclude I was at least partly wrong :)

15-18 years ago my passion was in OODBs. As a Smalltalker GemStone was one of the most fascinating to work with, but as we all know OODBs never got really popular, despite their fantastic qualities. But the new NoSQL databases in many respects offer OODB-ish characteristics, although they of course also bring a whole new menu to the table.