I'm personally a fan of regular old Java/C#-like concurrent garbage collection for most "scripting" languages (perhaps surprisingly, given my work on Rust). It's a lot of work to get there, but I think there's no substitute for doing the work—apps really end up needing the flexibility of shared memory. Shortcuts that seem simple like DRC end up tending to run into walls in practice, which is something that the other languages discovered—history keeps pointing to the HotSpot-style garbage collector as the one that systems that need to offer a simple, general-purpose garbage-collected programming model migrate to.

For different use cases Rust-style ownership semantics (when the performance of GC and runtime interoperability become an issue), or Azul-style pauseless GC (when you're willing to trade throughput for latency), or shared-nothing architectures (when you need them for legacy reasons like JavaScript, or want a simple programming model like Erlang) can work great.

"You pay a high price in complexity and inflexibility for that juicy GC-less yet safe memory management."

It's a price that a lot of people are willing to pay, because of how badly they want what they're paying for.

Nim and Rust have different goals, different tradeoffs, and overlapping target audiences. Having both is good. Making them fight is bad.

> Nim is as safe as any other language.

With regards to memory safety, it is not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050999 is an old comment from Patrick, but in today's Nim, it segfaults in both release and development modes for me. Rust's guaranteed memory safety means that Rust code (without explicit unsafe, the vast vast majority of code) cannot segfault.

> I don't understand why people think that Nim is "terribly unsafe" when in reality it's like any other language

For example, unless I write a bad cext, I cannot get Ruby to segfault.

None of this makes Nim a bad language. All languages have tradeoffs.

It has a feel of a scripting language, but as far as I can tell, it rather has the safety of C/C++, which I personally wouldn't call "safe like any other language".

"Nim is as safe as any other language."

That is factually false.

"Perhaps it's not as safe as Rust"

And there even you have contradicted yourself.

"Perhaps it's not as safe as Rust but that brings specific trade offs most people dont wan't to deal with."

That much is true ... and can be said without telling falsehoods, like your first statement.

"I don't understand why people think that Nim is "terribly unsafe" when in reality it's like any other language"

You are confused by your own strawman.

This is some glass-houses logic right here, given that you're attempting to leverage trivially-falsifiable assertions in order to profile pcwalton as a Nim hater with a personal vendetta. In the meantime you have yet to actually address his criticisms, which, to reiterate, indicates that you're trying to shut down critics via deflection.

(I suppose, in the future, pcwalton should just generate a throwaway before commenting on Nim.)