On: Nimrod by Example

[rsaarelm]

This. I'm on the lookout for expressive, statically typed, native code compiling languages for game development. Currently poking around with Rust, since Go seems to pretty much be settled on not doing the custom expressibility thing. Nimrod looks like something I'd really want to like, the game stuff I do doesn't really need Rust's hardcore garbage collection avoidance, but the ecosystem sparsity just scares me off. Meanwhile, Rust has both reasonably heavy institutional support and an impressive swarm of adventurous game developers with a C++ background working on stuff for it. I'm banking on Rust mostly for the potential ecosystem strength in being the only alternative to C++ for a high level of abstraction don't pay for what you don't use language.

[def- → rsaarelm]

The standard library is pretty nice though: http://nimrod-lang.org/lib.html

I spent a few days solving Rosetta Code tasks and was surprised how easy most were using the existing libraries: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Nimrod

[dom96 → def-]

We also already have a pretty functional package manager (https://github.com/nimrod-code/babel) and many packages already make use of it: http://nimrod-lang.org/lib.html#babel

[fineline → dom96]

I see the Babel doco has now been changed (10 hrs ago - any relation to this HN post?) to say I can run Babel against Nimrod 0.9.4 stable instead of needing to build Nimrod from source. This is great news, I was put off by the language's package manager not working against the stable release version. I look forward to giving this a try.

[dom96 → fineline]

It's great news indeed. It seems I underestimated how many people will be having trouble building babel due to this. Next time I will do my best to make sure that it works with the latest Nimrod release.

[girvo → fineline]

I will say building Nimrod from source is quite literally the easiest language that I've compiled before, aside from Node.js! Super easy :)

[tdees40 → rsaarelm]

There really are only three ways to create a usable language, honestly:

1) Huge institutional support. See: C#, Java, Go.

2) Give it 20 years. See: Python, Haskell.

3) Weird, idiosyncratic factors. See: Javascript, mostly.

So it's hard for me to get excited about these sorts of things.

Edit: fair point, Javascript is really a case of #1, with Netscape as the institution.

[skrebbel → tdees40]

You're missing 4) piggybacking on existing ecosystems. E.g. Scala, Clojure, F#.

[def- → skrebbel]

In Nimrod it's easy to piggyback on C, which has the most extensive ecosystem of all languages.

[sanderjd → def-]

But C's ecosystem is so extensive that everybody can piggyback on it (with varying levels of ceremony).

[tdees40 → sanderjd]

See CPython, Haskell, C++....

[sitkack → def-]

This might already exist, but if Nimrod could piggy back on Javascript (Node), Python and Ruby for libraries this would be huge. Native glue.

[ascent → sitkack]

This is what Perl6 with Parrot VM aim for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine

[Pacabel → ascent]

I don't think that we can really consider Perl 6 and Parrot to be anything but abysmal failures at this point. The people developing and advocating for them have had many years now to product something that's even minimally usable, and we just haven't seen that happen.

Writing traditional compilers and interpreters, or emitting C, or targeting LLVM have all proven to be good ways of getting production-grade programming language implementations created and usable quickly. Messing around with Parrot has never resulted in anything useful.

[chromatic → ascent]

That was the goal, but Parrot failed to meet that goal and P6 is years away from being usable.

[S4M → tdees40]

How about Perl, Ruby and C?

pg said that for a language to become popular, it has to be the scripting language of something popular. That's the category where the three languages I mentioned are falling.

So the answer is simple: one has to build something really nice in Nimrod and use Nimrod as the extension language of that thing. Maybe the embedded world would be a nice field from Nimrod due to having nice interop with C? (I haven't used Nimrod in my life yet, although I am tempted because it looks very easy).

[tdees40 → S4M]

Perl is a (3) as it was the scripting language on *Nix, and CGI was pretty crucial in the early web.

Ruby I guess is a (3): Rails is a killer app.

C, well, it's the a major accomplishment of human civilization and has held up for half a century. I'd call that idiosyncratic.

[WaxProlix → S4M]

I feel like Lua is used pretty broadly for UI scripting in the games ecosystem (addons, plugins, etc) but I don't see it used really anywhere else aside from maybe IRC chatbots. Being the scripting language for something popular is maybe a necessary but probably not sufficient condition.

[pjmlp → S4M]

C had AT&T and was UNIX system programming language.

As UNIX spread into the industry, so did C.

All languages required by OS vendors as the official ones to target their OS, succeed in the market if the OS succeeds.

[tlo → pjmlp]

True, Objective-C comes into mind.

[zabcik → tdees40]

I think it's only the first two. Javascript happened because of Netscape (1).

[stewbrew → rsaarelm]

It you're in game development, you might want to take a look at haxe. It seems many users use it successfully for games.

[runT1ME → rsaarelm]

OCaml?