Any plans to develop this into something beyond a hobby project? I think a Qt rival in a language safer and more pleasant than C++ would be welcomed by more than a few people.

At least I personally would like to use it to ship commercial cross-platform apps w/o needing electron or something huge like QT. Nim is much more pleasant than C++! You can actually embed the Nim compiler (~8MB) and run Nim as scripts too, so in theory you could remotely update your app as a nimscript.

P.S. drop me a line (emails on my github profile) if you're interested

In defence of Qt, there's a lot of functionality in there, and they've made it modular.

To my knowledge Qt's library binaries have roughly the same file sizes as, say, their Gtk equivalents. I wouldn't expect a new competitor to be that different.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

Like the sibling I'd be very much interested in this! Have you considered open-sourcing the GUI library part?

What do you use for controls, native OS objects or something custom drawn? If the latter, you're in for a word of pain with screen reader compatibility, internationalization, right-to-left languages, handling of Asian input methods etc.

> If the latter, you're in for a word of pain with screen reader compatibility, internationalization, right-to-left languages, handling of Asian input methods etc.

Custom drawn, and yep it's a pain! Actually emoji's seem the hardest (e.g. smiley face + skin tone).

The windowing library I'm building upon uses the OS'es input method editors (IME). For example MacOS'es functions for composing letters like `é` already works. Hopefully Asian input methods will work via the OS'es IME. Luckily I know a bit of (modern) Hebrew, so I'll can add basic RTL languages soon.

Pixie can render svg and ttf fonts with unicode in addition to drawing the shapes used for boxes and lines (e.g. like pango+cairo). It's SIMD optimized, very fast, and pure Nim so cross platform.

The challenge I mentioned with emojis is text selection and cursor movement when dealing with multi-grapheme characters. :)

edit: see https://youtu.be/8acDfUIwLnk?si=1EAUwUNZqje88J86&t=382 where they discuss how hard Text is

(Nim compiles to C, so in fact it compiles to exactly that).

    type MyObject[T] = object
        val: int
        other: T

Edit: oh X, Y, Z are singletons I guess? Still don't see the flexibility or dependent types?

To quote from Wikipedia:

    dependent types are used to encode logic's quantifiers like "for all" and "there exists". ... dependent types help reduce bugs by enabling the programmer to assign types that further restrain the set of possible implementations

    type
      State = enum Open, Closed
      SomeObject[T: State] = object
        val: int
      SomeObjectOpen = not SomeObject[state.Close]

    proc close(obj: SomeObjectOpen) = ...

Ya I don't think this is a good definition of dependent type - the prototypical example of a dependent type is a k-length vector. Obviously there's a mapping from what you wrote to this (in the same way there's almost always a mapping from a sequence of decision problems to an optimization problem) but it's still not a good formulation.

> In my example the objects could be any object types, combination of types, or concepts

Um yes this is literally what I was asking with respect to top ⊤.

> usually can't [contain] expressions

ya the negation is interesting - I wonder how it's implemented.

Yah that's why I qualified my statement as dependent type like setup as I don't know a good definition of dependent types which I really grok and I've only briefly dabbled in it. It'd be awesome if you could point out a good resource showing a clear example / simple proof.

Well I started working on statically typed vector concepts [1]. The compiler can't do `proc concat[N,M: static int](v1: Vector[N], v2: Vector[M}): Vector[N+M]` and it fails. It might be able to be implemented via a macro like `proc concat(v1: Vector[N], v2: Vector[M}): typeFromSumOf(N,M)`, but I haven't tried yet.

Also just using static ints would require specific values at some point to work I think. Whereas you'd really want "induction" of some sort. Maybe a SAT solver would be required at that point? There's DrNim [2] which does tie Z3 but it's sorta dormant.

> Um yes this is literally what I was asking with respect to top ⊤.

Ah, I didn't know what you meant by top T.

> ya the negation is interesting - I wonder how it's implemented.

Nim's VM runs from Nim AST, so probably running it as a VM expression.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/platonic 2: https://nim-lang.org/docs/drnim.html

What does this mean? There's a runtime VM or compile time VM?

Compile time VM. It's used to run macros / templates / concepts. You can also run most code at compile time in a `static` block except for stuff that needs C calls. You can also compile the VM into a program and use it as a runtime VM (see https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter) which I do in my GUI lib. NIR should enable the compile time VM to run faster too, and possibly use JIT'ed code.