Nim

Impressions

  • Syntax can be confusing and somewhat cumbersome.

  • I might rank the language higher, but the syntax is off-putting, and it doesn’t target a specific niche.

  • Compiling to C/C++ and JS is interesting, but that’s the main reason someone might use it.

    • Could be useful if you work with C/C++.

  • Installing Nim on Windows triggered antivirus alerts.

  • Opinions:

    • "The language doesn’t seem to solve anything. It doesn’t have a niche."

    • "It’s one of my favorite programming languages for rapid prototyping red teaming tools."

    • "Fun fact: Nim has grown in popularity in the ethical hacking/red teaming community due to its simplicity, cross-compilation, and easy access to the Windows API with the winim library."

About

  • Supports OOP.

  • Nim in 100s

  • First appeared in 2008.

  • Official site

  • GitHub repo

  • Package manager: Nimble

  • Seems not to support mobile compilation.

  • Garbage-collected (GC can be disabled for manual memory management)

    • Nim provides different GC strategies for performance tuning:

      • refc : Reference counting (default)

      • orc : Optimized reference counting (since Nim 1.4)

      • markAndSweep : Traditional mark-and-sweep

      • boehm : Integration with external Boehm GC

      • none : No GC (useful for real-time or embedded systems)

    • Despite having GC, Nim allows manual memory management, letting developers optimize memory use.

    • Modules like std/memutils  aid explicit allocation and deallocation.

  • Can compile to C , C++ , or JavaScript . 

    nim c --genScript hello.nim    # Generates C code
nim cpp --genScript hello.nim  # Generates C++ code

  • Supports macros and other metaprogramming features.

Popularity

  • 0.4%

  • Extremely niche

Security

  • Default:  Private

    • Everything in a Nim module is private by default. Use *  to make it public.

Syntax

  • Overall, syntax is strange for anything moderately complex: 

echo "hello mom"

var message1 = "nim has inference"
var message2: string = "nim is cool"

if a:
    if b:
        c = false
    else:
        c = true

for i in countup(6, 9):
    echo i

for i in countdown(9, 6):
    echo i

  • OOP example: 

type
    Animal = ref object of RootObj  # Base class (abstract)
        name: string

    Cat = ref object of Animal  # Subclass Cat
        breed: string

    Dog = ref object of Animal  # Subclass Dog
        breed: string

# Dynamic method for "speak"
method speak(a: Animal) {.base.} =
    echo a.name & " makes an unknown sound."

method speak(c: Cat) =
    echo c.name & " meows!"

method speak(d: Dog) =
    echo d.name & " barks!"

# Creating instances
let myCat = Cat(name: "Felix", breed: "Siamese")
let myDog = Dog(name: "Rex", breed: "Labrador")

# Calling polymorphic methods
speak(myCat)  # Output: "Felix meows!"
speak(myDog)  # Output: "Rex barks!"

  • *  marks public members (unusual).

  • var  declares variables.

  • Difference between const  and let :

    • const  is evaluated at compile-time; let  is evaluated at runtime.

  • .forbids  concept is useful for team collaboration.

Godot

Gdext-Nim