Schemescape

From one of blog posts [0]:

Nim Nim is the language that impressed me the most in this batch. Everything I thought would be a problem (significant whitespace, choose-your-own-function syntax, intermediate C compliation step) didn't bother me at all. The small sample of the standard library I played with was a little quirky, but Nim seems like excellent bang for your buck. Notes: - Release binary was only 120 KB (linked against libc)! - Thought I'd dislike the syntax, but it was fine - Really easy to get started, many things "just worked" (e.g. grabbing a slice of an array) - Didn't have to specify too many types, but still ran fast - Fast compilation - Didn't like the "hints" it spews out during compilation, even for nim r (build and run) - Why did all take an anonymous function, but foldl took just an expression (with a and b seemingly picked out of thin air) -- is foldl a macro? - Nim might be a good language for hobby projects because it's easy, fast, and produces small binaries - I wonder what the debugging experience is like -- if it's decent, I might be writing a lot more Nim in the future! This exactly my thoughts on Nim and why I use it almost exclusively for all my hobby projects.

0-https://log.schemescape.com/posts/programming-languages/100-languages-9.html

https://log.schemescape.com/posts/programming-languages/future-proof-languages-3.html

"Future-proof programming languages, part 3

March 3, 2023

SDK size (measured on x86_64 Alpine Linux), as a proxy for simplicity

Just looking at SDK size, Rust is an outlier. Even compared to a similarly complex language like C++, the Rust SDK is absolutely huge.

Even after allowing for a build tool, custom linker, and standard library, the Rust SDK is disappointingly heavy.

The other languages show some interesting results: JavaScript and C# appear to be the most bloated, closely followed by SBCL (a Common Lisp implementation).

If I'm just looking for a simple and fast language, that would leave C, Go, and Zig.

C is almost certainly future-proof for another decade or two and the SDK is reasonably sized.

I don't like Python."

A related article I read yesterday lamented that 1GB of RAM isn't enough to run a graphical browser anymore (1). Sure JavaScript runs fast now, but at the cost of the code size of the average website being unnecessarily large. This is because speedy js and speedy network connectivity allows for more code, more network requests. Another example of Wirth's law.

This was the case when I got a Rapberry Pi 4 with 1GB of RAM about late 2019. You could run one tab of Chrome, but any more and it would be killed.

(1) https://log.schemescape.com/posts/hardware/farewell-to-a-netbook.html