Which language should I use for low level programming (OS development), Rust or Nim?

[zicklag]

@ZiCog

It's just that if I want to smash a brick wall down I don't need a deep understanding of rubber mallets to know they will not be suitable for the job.

Definitely a valid point there. It's when something gets to a certain point that they are both very suitable for a job that you have to look much more carefully between the options.

[2e71828]

@zicklag

It's when something gets to a certain point that they are both very suitable for a job that you have to look much more carefully between the options.

If they’re both very suitable for the job, you can flip a coin and move on. Careful consideration is only needed when none of the tools are a good fit and you need to make them work anyway.

[zicklag]

But when they are both suitable, and they are very different, then each choice means potentially changing your life quite drastically. ( Your programming life anyway ). Anything that has such a profound impact on your experience programming, especially when you are going to be doing a lot of programming or using it for an important project, deserves careful consideration.

[ZiCog]

At some point, on many decisions never mind programming language choice, we have incomplete information and it is not practical to expend so much time and effort on getting it. We have to move forward or be paralyzed.

So we go with our gut.

Then we rationalize the choice afterwards if anyone asks.

I go with Rust, my gut told me to.

[geebee22]

For anyone reading the comments on this post, please note the subject line changed : "(OS development)" was added. This changes the question quite substantially, IMO, the early comments were addressing a different question - I was quite confused for a few minutes, before noticing the edit.

[TomP]

Personally, if would use Rust where I could, rather than C++. For those places where I still need C, including bare-metal bootstrapping, I would use Zig, which not only can compile C code but also has incorporated many features of Rust, thus reducing the impedance mismatch. I would not use a language that needed a garbage collector (GC).

[Joe232]

@zicklag

The reason is because most people on a certain language forum have only used their own language, or at least uses it much more! It's not that everybody in Rust is just close-minded to other languages, but it does take real investment in both languages to really answer the question in an unbiased, or relatively unbiased, manner.

I would say that with Redox, Rust has proven that it can program operating systems. If you want to know whether or not it worked really well for them, then maybe you can ask some Redox developers somewhere how they feel about it ( again, though, they are going to prefer Rust most-likely ).

Even if you do get understandably biased responses, what you can still do with those responses is try to understand why they prefer Rust and the analyze whether or not their reasons resonate with your own motivations and reasons for wanting to choose a particular language.

Yes you are right about that.

@zicklag

Are you able to turn the ARC or GC off in Nim? That's Rust's biggest advantage is that it doesn't need either ARC or GC most of the time, but you can add it when you want it. If Nim has ARC or GC enabled by default, then that is probably going to hurt your general case performance compared to Rust because you don't have to work to turn off any garbage collector in Rust.

According to the Nim programmers, you can turn of ARC, but then you will be manually managing your memory usage yourself. At least with Rust it uses ownerships instead of making you do memory management yourself.