Discussion
NimConf 2026: Dates Announced, Registrations Open
repelsteeltje: Such a pity that this is an online-only conference.Does anyone know of an IRL conference or meetup on Nim, preferably in EU?
elcritch: I should give a talk. About what however? I’ve been happy with my progress on FigDraw (1), a 2D UI scene renderer using SDFs. Even made my own neovim ui shell with it!1: https://github.com/elcritch/figdraw
dhruv3006: Nim seems to be picking up a lot lately.
shevy-java: Not sure. I think it has a problem many languages have - too small a community. There is a lot of fragmentation in the last some years, I am not sure why, not just about nim but just look at how ruby has been dropping like a hot potato in the last ~3 years or more. I am so out of the loop that I could not even tell anyone what the young people are doing. Are there more who program than before? If so where do they go?
ModernMech: My students (18-21) are excited to learn Rust in my class I teach about programming languages. Younger students are learning Luau via Roblox -- spoke with a middle schooler on Sunday who was making games with his friends. They get introduced to Scratch in school and learn that until they move on to Java at middle and high school. I teach freshman Lua in their intro to engineering class, and they also go on to learn things like R, Matlab/Simulink, Python. Java, C, and C++ if they're a CS major.
elcritch: Combine that most CS students learn many languages with LLMs and coding agents and the size of the ecosystem isn't quite as important as it used to be. New hires can be productive from day 1. Missing libraries are relatively easy to add. Moreover the language characteristics can be more useful than ever: fast running, fast compiling, typed, easy to read, etc.
poulpy123: Really ? From what I see it survives OK but there is no real progression. I like what I saw of the language, and I'm regularly impressed by the productivity of the community relative to its size so I would like to see it more successful but I'm afraid it will not happen.
ModernMech: Yeah I think LLMs really help with the chicken-egg situation in language adoption. Contrary to many opinions that predict programming homogenizing around the big 3 languages that exist today (because that's what the LLMs currently write) I think in the future more nice languages will gain adoption as they are written by LLMs, who as you note don't care about a lack of community surrounding those langs -- if they need a missing library the AI can just write it. Maybe they even add it to the language ecosystem for other AI or humans.I think Python is actually kind of the worst language of the top langs to be the lingua franca of AI, where more niche statically typed languages like Nim are better suited.
giancarlostoro: For everyone wondering who may have been unaware. It is 100% remote, so you can just show up. :)> NimConf 2026 is an online conference and it will take place on June 20th. It will be streamed for free and it doesn’t require any traveling - you will be able to participate from your home, without any travel and accommodation expenses.https://conf.nim-lang.org/
corv: As a Pythonista I tend to agree. I had high hopes for Mojo but it's taking its due time to become usable outside the narrow focus of GPU programming, whereas Nim fits multiple niches surprisingly well.
