Will Nim be as versatile and solid as Go in the future? Hard to predict but i would say no. You need a solid financial backing and certain amount of adoption where people actually write software that makes them money.
Agreed, that's why I don't use it for anything super important yet. Nim is approaching a 1.0 release soon. Go has a similar problem in that it is maintained almost entirely by Google who has a history of dropping projects without warning.
> Go is more versatile and at the same time more mature than anything out there.
This is objectively incorrect. In fact, Go aims precisely to be non-versatile for the sake of simplicity. That is why Go does not have generics for instance.
> It is a different design and it excels in what it does (considering all tradeoffs now)
I don't think it's design is all that different. It looks like a stripped down version of C and it's definitely not the first PL focused on concurrency.
> Will Nim be as versatile and solid as Go in the future?
Nim is already leagues above Go in the versatility(I assume you mean flexibility?) department. As far Nim being as "solid" as Go, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you're asking about stability, I believe that Nim can reach a similar level of stability as Go, yes.
> You need a solid financial backing and certain amount of adoption where people actually write software that makes them money.
I agree with this. However, it's not always a quick process. The only reason Go is as popular as it is is because of Google's size and reputation(edited). Every programmer on Earth heard of Go within a few days of it's official release. Nim is taking a slow roll approach. Look at Python. It took almost 15 years before it started getting really popular.
All that said, I didn't come into this thread to argue about Go vs Nim. I've been accused of shilling Nim in the past. I'm sorry that I like talking about PLs I enjoy using.
The reasons Go doesn't (yet) have generics are practical rather than philosophical. And well-documented.
I also don't believe Google's marketing budget contributed much if anything to supporting Go. The _reputation_ of Google and the Go authors was far more important. (Personally, when I saw people like Brad Fitzpatrick try Go and rave about it making programming fun again, I decided to try it.)
You can happily accuse me of shilling Go if you like :-)
> The reasons Go doesn't (yet) have generics are practical rather than philosophical. And well-documented.
Can you give an example? I guess I fail to understand why a statically typed language would choose to forgo all of the advantages generics provide. Does it have something to do with Goroutines?
> I also don't believe Google's marketing budget contributed much if anything to supporting Go.
I didn't necessarily mean their marketing budget. I should probably edit that. I meant that anything they do is news.
I think Google put lot of marketing budget for Dart. But I don't see it ever comes in discussion regarding popularity or lack of it.
It is fine a lot of people do not like Go but claiming its popular just because of Google seems baseless.
This doesn't seem like a very credible statement on the face of it. Is Go more mature and more versatile than Python? Than Java? Than...Scala? Go does seem to share a lot of use cases (and limitations) with Java; and it would be hard to call it more mature.
It was the same for Linux, Python, Ruby. Being community-driven can be a bug or a feature.
> Go is more versatile
Nim has macros, templates, overloading and compiles to C, JS, Objective-C. Runs on more architectures than Go including arduino microcontrollers.
> mature than anything out there
Go is not more mature than C, C++, Java, Python, Perl...
> You need a solid financial backing
See Linux, Python, Ruby... many projects had no big company or funding behind them.
