GameDev with Nim

What the talk is about

Anton Sapihora, together with a colleague, explains why the team behind a game that mixes slots and a city builder, released on Facebook and Android, chose the Nim language for its own engine. The requirements were one codebase for web and mobile, easily expandable content, and real-time player interaction. Instead of off-the-shelf engines, the team decided to build its own solution. Nim compiles to C, so it runs natively, and for the browser the code is built through Emscripten, which gave much better performance than generating JavaScript. The talk shows macros and metaprogramming, serialization generated at compile time, a configurable garbage collector, and shaders written in the language itself. It also admits a weak spot: the ecosystem is young, and the team wrote more than 30 libraries itself. Useful for programmers and tech leads choosing technology for a cross-platform game.