Nim Community Survey Results ============================ .. container:: metadata Posted by Dominik Picheta on 20/08/2016 We have recently closed the 2016 Nim Community Survey. I am happy to say that we have received exactly 790 responses, huge thanks go to the people that took the time to respond. We're very thankful for this very valuable feedback. This survey was inspired in part by the `2016 State of Rust `_ survey. You will note that many of the questions were modelled after Rust's survey. One of the reasons for doing this was to allow us to easily compare our results against the results obtained in the Rust survey. In addition, we of course also liked many of their questions. Our survey ran from the 23rd of June 2016 until the 8th of August 2016. The response numbers are impressive considering Nim's community size; at 790 they make up just over 25% of the Rust survey's responses. The goal of this survey was to primarily determine how our community is using Nim, in order to better understand how we should be improving it. In particular, we wanted to know what people feel is missing from Nim in the lead up to version 1.0. We have also asked our respondents about how well the Nim tools worked, the challenges of adopting Nim, the resources that they used to learn Nim and more. It is my hope that we will be able to run a similar survey in a years time, doing so should give us an idea of whether we are improving. With these general facts in mind, let's begin looking at specific questions. How did you find out about Nim? ------------------------------- The rationale for the first question was simple, we wanted to know where our respondents found out about Nim. This is an interesting question for us, as we do occassionally get users asking us why it took so long for them to hear about Nim. It allows us to see how effective each website is at spreading the word about Nim. .. raw::html

The majority of our respondents found Nim via Reddit, HackerNews or a search engine such as Google. These results are not altogether surprising. There were also a lot of "Other" responses, some of which were a bit more interesting. These included multiple mentions of habrahabr.ru, Dr. Dobb's, and lobste.rs. Do you use Nim? --------------- Just like the Rust survey creators, we wanted to ensure that our survey was open to both Nim users as well people who never used Nim. In addition to those two groups, we have also included a third group of people: ex-Nim users. All three are interesting, for many different reasons. Nim users can tell us how they are using Nim and also how Nim's tooling can improve. Ex-Nim users give us an idea of why they stopped using Nim. Finally, respondents who never used Nim can tell us the reasons for not adopting it. .. raw::html

It's nice to see that we have such a good range of respondents. The Rust survey had a much larger number of Rust users amongst their respondents, with no distinction between users that never used Rust and users that stopped using Rust. .. raw::html

Should we consider your answers to be invalid? ---------------------------------------------- This was something I thought would be interesting to have, after I saw it being used in another survey. While it does pinpoint possibly invalid respondents, I have opted against filtering those out. Mainly because that would require re-creating each of the charts generated by Google Forms manually. .. raw::html

According to the responses to this question, around 94% of our responses can be considered reliable. Nim users --------- The following questions were answered only by the 38.9% of our respondents who identified themselves as Nim users. How long have you been using Nim? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. raw::html

A large proportion of our Nim users were new. This is good news as it means that our community is growing, with a large proportion of new Nim users that could become long-term Nimians. In total, more than 35% of Nim users can be considered new having used Nim for less than 3 months. With 18% of Nim users that can be considered very new having used Nim for less than a month. This could suggest that 18% of our users have only just found out about Nim in the last week or so and have not yet got the chance to use it extensively. The high percentages of long term Nim users are encouraging. They suggest that many users are continuing to use Nim after making it through the first few months. The sharp drop at 7-9 months is interesting, but may simply be due to the fact that there were fewer newcomers during that period, or it could be because our respondents are more likely to estimate that they have been using Nim for a year or half a year rather than the awkward 7-9 months. .. raw::html

The results for Nim and Rust are actually remarkably similar. They both show a drop at 7-9 months, although Rust's isn't as dramatic. Nim on the other hand has a significantly higher percentage of new Nim users. Do you use Nim at work? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ An important aspect of a language's adoption is whether it is being used for "real" work. We wanted to know how many people are using Nim in their day jobs and under what circumstances it is used. .. raw::html

While a vast majority of our users are not using Nim at work, more than 25% of them are. It's encouraging to see such a high number already, even before we have released version 1.0. In fact, this percentage is likely close to 30%, because many of the "Other" responses mention using Nim for the likes of internal tools or small scripts to help with the respondent's work. .. raw::html

Interestingly, a larger percentage of Nim users are using Nim at work than Rust users. The sample sizes are of course vastly different, but it's still an interesting result. Combined, nearly 1/5th of Rust users are using Rust commercially whereas more than a quarter of Nim users are using Nim commercially. Approximately how large are all the Nim projects that you work on? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Finding out how large the Nim projects worked on by Nim users are is also very valuable. .. raw::html

This shows us that currently Nim is primarily being used for small scripts and applications, with nearly 60% of the projects consisting of less than 1,000 lines of code. This makes sense as many of our users are not using Nim professionally, but are doing so in their spare time. .. raw::html

The numbers for part-time and full-time work users of Nim tell a different story. Over 70% of the projects written by full-time users are between 10,001 and 100,000 lines of code. Part-time users show a slightly different trend, with many more small projects, the majority being between 1,000 and 10,000 lines of code. Overall it's good to see that there is a few large projects out there which are composed of more than 100,000 lines of code. We expect to see the amount of large projects to grow with time, especially with version 1.0 on the way. .. raw::html

Nim project size for work users (Nim vs. Rust)

In comparison to Rust the proportion of project sizes for full-time users is vastly different. This is likely due to our small sample size. Project sizes for part-time users between Rust and Nim are somewhat similar, with differences of around 10% for each project size. Do you plan to try to use Nim at work? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. raw::html

It's also encouraging to see that over 50% of Nim users are planning to use Nim at work! This is slightly more than Rust's 40% and should help Nim's adoption into even more areas. Nim and its tools ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In this section of the survey, we wanted to find out the tools that Nim users are utilising when developing Nim applications. What editor(s) do you use when writing Nim? ___________________________________________ Programmers are very specific when it comes to their editor of choice, because of that it's good to know which editor is most popular among our community. .. raw::html

Looks like Vim is the winner with almost 30%. Followed by Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code. Aporia, the Nim IDE, gets a respectable 15.5%. There was also more than 17% of answers which included "Other" editors, such as: Notepad++, Geany, gedit, and Kate. What operating system(s) do you compile for and run your Nim projects on? _________________________________________________________________________ This question gave us information about the most popular target operating systems, as well as some of the more obscure ones. We have asked this question to find out the platforms on which Nim applications run on most frequently. .. raw::html

This question allowed multiple choices, so each percentage is out of the total number of respondents for this question. For example, 80.7% of the respondents selected "Linux" but only 26.6% selected OS X. This makes Linux by far the most popular target for Nim applications. Some "Other" targets included: BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD), iOS, Android, and JavaScript. It's great to see Nim being used on such a wide variety of platforms. What operating system(s) do you develop Nim projects on? ________________________________________________________ With this question, we wanted to know what operating systems are used for development. .. raw::html

This question also allowed multiple choices and ended up with very similar results. You can see that Linux is also the most popular developmental platform for Nim. But it's more popular as a target platform. Which version(s) of Nim do you use for your applications? _________________________________________________________ .. raw::html

At the time of this survey, version 0.14.2 was the latest stable release. It's no wonder that it is the most commonly used release of Nim. It's good to see that the older versions are not used as often. The high use of ``Git HEAD (devel)`` (nightly builds) isn't surprising, Nim is still evolving rapidly and our release schedule is not regular or frequent. Once we go past the 1.0 release, we expect to see much less use of the unstable ``devel`` branch.