Nim vs DASH

There are generics, templates, macros in Nim. They can allow you to write new DSL for your application, or avoid all boilerplate stuff.

Checks your code at compile time.

With built-in "unittest" module you can create test with a very readable code.

Nim has "asyncdispatch" module, which allows you to write async applications.

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.

The same code can be used for web, server, desktop and mobile.

Nim has a lot of common with Python in terms of syntax. Indentation-based syntax, for/while loops.

Imperative, OOP, functional programming in one language.

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).

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.

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).

You can use unicode names for variables, there is "unicode" module for operations with unicode.

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()

Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.

It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX.

DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead.

It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells.

It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell.