Second this. Their BDFL's personality is not suited for the job IMHO.
Example: Nim's hash table data structures (Python dict, Go map) are called tables. There are several variants of these, including OrderedTable. Deleting a key from an OrderedTable had O(n) performance because Nim built an entirely new OrderedTable, filtering out the key to be deleted. There were a couple of reasons for this:
- the internal list that preserved element order was only forward threaded, making an O(1) delete impossible
- Nim tables allowed the same key to be inserted multiple times, each with different values. I thought this was a bit crazy compared to other languages.
I tried to changed OrderedTable to use a doubly-linked list to allow O(1) deletes, and to get the multiple key feature removed.
What I didn't realize is that Araq, the BDFL, used ordered tables a lot in the Nim compiler, used the multiple value feature, and didn't want to add the memory overhead of a 2nd list to OrderedTable. His main reason was "deletes don't happen too often". At that point it became impossible to convince him that for a hash table to have O(n) delete performance was ridiculous and would be unexpected for anyone using OrderedTable. I gave up, left, and haven't been back.
It's amazing how many fights he gets into with Status-IM engineers who are the biggest financial supporters of the project and the only noteworthy company that heavily uses Nim.
Has OrderedTable been ported to Nimony? Does it still have this bug?
Why haven't they happened yet though...? Nim is not a young language. Leadership [Andreas] doesn't think they are more important than spending time adding another memory management option.
There has never been much prog.lang. benefit from being "in the stdlib/core" in Nim (unlike Python or Go, say). The benefit is more "software distribution" for the dependency allergic, but the Nim culture is much less micro-deps than seems in vogue lately. All that said, I think having a more batteries core distribution is valuable - just less than you might guess - and practically that needs delegation.