Why to use Nemerle?

[Yehudit R]

Hello, I would like to ask you guys a very simple question...

what is so special about Nemerle? 

what are the benefits over c# and other languages? 

and why was it invented anyway?!

thank you very much!

[Dmitri Kirillov]

Hello, Yehudit.

One of the most advanced Nemerle features is powerful support for metaprogramming, i.e. an ability to alter source code syntax and semantics through macros. Other key features are type inference and support for functional and object-oriented programming. Nemerle combines powers from many programming paradigms with familiarity for mainstream developers, because it's very similar to C# in its object-oriented part.

You can find out more here: http://www.nemerle.org/About

Best regards,
Dmitri.

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[יהודית רייזר‎]

Thank you very much! your answer was very helpful..

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[יהודית רייזר‎]

In addition to the previous question. can you please tell me what are the disadvantages of Nemerle?

[Dmitri Kirillov]

Hello, Yehudit.

There is a lot of things to take into account while considering whether to use Nemerle for your next project, but, probably, the biggest disappointment is that the main project rsdn/nemerle doesn't seem to be active at the moment.

P.S. - A note to active project members: Don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong.

Sincerely yours,
Dmitri.

[Dustin Mays]

Howdy!

I'm not a core project member (or even really active on this forum), but I'm working here and there on a fork of Nemerle (which I would like to eventually get merged upstream; the repository is at https://github.com/nerdshark/nemerle). I'm not actively adding features to the compiler or libraries; instead, my current focus is on:

• cleaning, reorganizing, and refactoring the repository;
• writing a new, streamlined, easy-to-extend-and-maintain MSBuild build system;
• cleaning up the installer projects;
• remove committed dependencies and switch to NuGet dependencies
• adding support for multi-targeting;
• adding compatibility fixes where needed for currently-unsupported versions of .NET;
• and, finally, writing a new Visual Studio extension and project/item templates (much of the work will be concurrent with the multi-targeting work).

Multi-targeting technically already works, if you hand-maintain your project's build system outside of Visual Studio; you can set your TargetFrameworkVersion manually and the Nemerle compiler will happily output assemblies linked against that .NET Framework version (if that version of the Framework is installed, of course). The problem appears to be in the Visual Studio add-in, which I haven't taken a very close look at yet.

I'm intending to make some very large, compatibility-breaking changes; I think the largest one is dropping support for VS 2010, and targeting either VS 2012 or VS 2013 as the minimum supported version. Since VS Community Edition became available, I don't think there's a good excuse for people to remain on ancient versions of Visual Studio; additionally, removing support for VS 2010 (and targeting VS 2012/2013 as minimum) will simplify a lot of code. Having said that, I WOULD like to hear reasoning for continuing VS 2010 support, if there is any. The other major breaking change that I can immediately think of will be the new project and item templates. I've been doing a LOT of refactoring in Nemerle's MSBuild toolkit (the .target and .props files that configure the Nemerle build environment) in order to enable multi-targeting, and in the process a lot of duplicated/conflicting/unused stuff has been removed; some of these changes touch the item and project templates. VS has functionality for writing project file migrators, which I will do, but there may be changes that have to be made by hand (especially if you've hand-edited your project files). I'm not intending on making any code-breaking compatibility changes, but if it becomes necessary, it'll be documented and announced.

I have quite a few commits that I haven't pushed yet, which I'll get around to in the next few days. I'll also work on getting issues created for the tasks that I'm working on/plan to work on, as well as document what I've already done and write up a roadmap for the future. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to help out, please do get in touch! There's plenty of work to go around, and I'd love the company! You can get a hold of me via my email here, via Hangouts, or in #nemerle on freenode (nick is nerdshark).

- Dustin

[Dmitri Kirillov]

Thank you, Dustin.
Really good job!

[NN]

Wow,
very interesting.

Why don't you make a pull request from your repository ?
There was an attempt to do that, but it wasn't finished.

[Dustin Mays]

Sure! I was planning to do that later, once things were working and in a known-good state, but if y'all don't mind me making the PR early and using it to track progress, then I'll do it right now. :)

[Suminda Dharmasena]

Hello,

Just wondering if the updates got merged?

Suminda

[Dustin Mays]

Nope, there's still a bunch of work to be done before my changes will be ready to merge.

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