When comparing Nim vs Boo, the Slant community recommends Nim for most people. In the question“What are the best languages to learn for someone coming from Python?” Nim is ranked 2nd while Boo is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Nim is:
The same code can be used for web, server, desktop and mobile.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Really crossplatform
The same code can be used for web, server, desktop and mobile.
Pro Strict typing
Checks your code at compile time.
Pro Multi paradigm
Imperative, OOP, functional programming in one language.
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 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 Easy to read
Nim has a lot of common with Python in terms of syntax.
Indentation-based syntax, for/while loops
Pro Built-in Unicode support
You can use unicode names for variables, there is "unicode" module for operations with unicode
Pro Has built-in unittest module
With built-in "unittest" module you can create test with a very readable code
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 you real-time application or a game
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 Compile-time execution
Nim has 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 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 Has built-in async support
Nim has "asyncdispatch" module, which allows you to write async applications.
Pro IDE support
The open-source #develop comes with Boo support.
Pro Static type safety
This also improves performance as compared to IronPython. You can still use duck typing if you want, but you mostly don't need to since Boo can infer the type based on context.
Pro Inter-operates with other .NET languages
Boo runs on the .NET platform, so you can pretty much use it for anything C# is good for.
Pro One of Unity's supported languages
Use your Python skills to make games.
Pro Familiar syntax
Boo's syntax was heavily influenced by Python's, but makes some improvements like macros and multi-line lambdas.
Cons
Con Still in pre 1.0
Not very stable and has a rather small community.
Con The documentation isn't as good as Python's
There are some Boo textbooks. You can also find examples of Boo's language features in the Git repository, but it doesn't seem to have a thorough description of the language itself like Python does.