In this post, I will talk about a Nim library that I am really fond of called Futhark, how it works, and some examples.
What is Futhark?
Futhark is a library that allows you to automatically wrap C libraries, and use them in Nim.
It uses clang to understand C syntax and semantics, and is very accurate compared to c2nim and nimterop for this reason.
Futhark is in a beta state, though it is mostly stable in my experience. Futhark is made by PMunch, a person that is very well-known in the Nim community, and that has a lot of useful libraries for the language.
My experience with Futhark
As some of you may know, I am the main developer and founder of Kreato Linux. As an independent Linux distribution, we have our own package manager, build system and the like. Writing these in pure Nim is quite a challenge as the package ecosystem is not mature enough (unlike languages like Rust, Go, etc.) to have native, full-featured libraries for things like Git, archiving/unarchiving files, et cetera. While I was rewriting functions of kpkg in Nim, I have noticed that invoking the shell for such purposes is inefficient, and can result in undefined errors. This was mainly the reason as to why I have started looking for a C interop tool.
There were a couple of options, starting with interop by hand (manual). This was not viable as I wanted to use huge libraries like libarchive and libgit2, which would take days to implement correctly. Another option was using nimterop/c2nim, but I never managed to get a viable, ready-to-use output from them. Then I discovered Futhark, and never looked back.
Code examples
- On kpkg, there is modules/libarchive.nim which is basically a reimplementation minitar/untar.c on libarchive (the createArchive part is still a work-in-progress)
- The tests of Futhark also has good examples.
- The Futhark readme has good examples, and pretty much enough to get started.
Conclusion
In general, Nim is an incredible language. But without an ecosystem of packages, things can get dire sometimes. With Futhark though, its usable in my opinion. If you are a current Nim user, I would recommend you to check out Futhark, especially if you struggle with ecosystem issues like I was. I would also recommend people that use languages like Zig to check out Futhark, as it is pretty impressive, and if you use these languages for their C interop, this library may make you try out Nim.