When comparing Nim vs Lua, the Slant community recommends Lua for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Lua is ranked 16th while Nim is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Lua is:
One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game. Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great metaprogramming features
There are generics, templates, macros in Nim. They can allow you to write new DSL for your application, or avoid all boilerplate stuff.
Pro Strict typing
Checks your code at compile time.
Pro Has built-in unittest module
With built-in "unittest" module you can create test with a very readable code.
Pro Compile-time execution
Nim has a built-in VM, which executes macros and some other code at compile time. For example, you can check if you're on Windows, and Nim will generate code only for it.
Pro Has built-in async support
Nim has "asyncdispatch" module, which allows you to write async applications.
Pro Really cross-platform
The same code can be used for web, server, desktop and mobile.
Pro Easy to read
Nim has a lot of common with Python in terms of syntax. Indentation-based syntax, for/while loops.
Pro Multi paradigm
Imperative, OOP, functional programming in one language.
Pro Easy to integrate with another languages
You can use Nim with any language that can be interfaced with C. There's a tool which helps you to create new C and C++ bindings for Nim - c2nim.
Also, you can use Nim with Objective C or even JavaScript (if you're compiling for these backends).
Pro Garbage-collected
You don't need to deal with all those manual memory allocations, Nim can take care of it. But also you can use another GC, or tweak it for your real-time application or a game.
Pro Type interferencing
You only need to specify types in your procedures and objects - you don't need to specify type when you're creating a new variable (unless you're creating it without initialization).
Pro Built-in Unicode support
You can use unicode names for variables, there is "unicode" module for operations with unicode.
Pro Supports UFCS (Unified Function Call Syntax)
writeLine(stdout, "hello") can be written as stdout.writeLine("hello")
proc add(a: int): int = a + 5 can be used like 6.add.echo or 6.add().echo()
Pro Very easy to integrate with C and C++
One of the best features of Lua is its very well designed C API. This is very useful if you have an existing C library you need to integrate with Lua or quickly get a Lua script running on the C side of the game.
Finally Lua plays so nice with C that if you need to optimise for speed you can re-write it in C a lot easier than other languages.
Pro Great documentation
The official Lua documentation is very helpful and thorough. There are also a large number of online resources or books with lots of helpful information for beginners and advanced users alike.
Pro Portable
Lua can be built on any platform with a ANSI C compiler.
Other than that, Lua is extremely small. For example, the tarball for Lua 5.2.1 is only 245K compressed and 960K uncompressed (including documentation).
When built on Linux, the Lua interpreter built with the standard libraries takes 182K and the Lua library takes 243K.
The small size and the ability to build with a C compiler make Lua an extremely portable language that can run on a lot of different systems and computers.
Pro Simple
Easy to learn.
Pro Fast
Lua's performance compares very well to other languages, If performance needs to be further improved you can:
- Implement critical parts in C
- Use the LuaJIT compiler. The LuaJIT compiler is a drop in replacement for the stock compiler and provides significant performance improvements. From the overview page:
LuaJIT speeds can rival code written in C.
Pro Embeddable
Many different game engines (e.g. Elder Scrolls series, ToME) use Lua for scripting, and it's runtime is designed for embedded use.
Pro Clean and simple syntax suitable for beginners
The Lua syntax is modeled from Modula, a language known for being a fantastic introduction to programming.
The Lua syntax also has the following key characteristics:
- Semicolon as a statement separator is optional (mostly used to resolve ambiguous cases as in a = f; (g).x(a)).
- Syntactic sugar for function calls (f'string', f"string", f[[string]], and f{table}) and method calls (obj:m()).
Pro Helpful community
Due to the growing popularity, Lua has a rather large and helpful community surrounding it.
Cons
Con Easy to make mistakes when declaring variables
When writing a function, if a programmer forgets to declare a variable, that variable will be declared at global scope. The code will seem to run fine at first, but if another function uses a variable with the same name, but fails to declare it, it will create subtle, incredibly difficult to find bugs.
Con Some concepts may not be applied to other "mainstream" programming languages
Lua features a prototye-based inheritance model. While this is also used by Javascript, it's not used by many other mainstream languages, and so some of the concepts learned while learning Lua won't be very applicable to other languages.
Another thing that makes Lua different from other programming languages, is the fact that Arrays start at 1 instead of 0. While helpful for beginners, it can complicate logic and make it very confusing when switching languages.
Con Batteries not included
Lua is so small mainly due to many of the components not being included in the core package. A lot of people need the functionality provided by the Lua module management system LuaRocks and libraries such as Penlight.
