New languages emerge to fill niches that the existing ones don't satisfy. Must-have devops tools for Windows admins. | The InfoWorld review: macro facility allows code to be changed at compile time by Nim code rather than by a preprocessor. The resulting executables are tiny -- a "hello, world" compiles to around 150K in Windows -- and have no external dependencies save for those you specify.
Memory management in Nim is by default available for Nim isn't near what's available in Go or Rust yet, though.
Nim's biggest disadvantage right now is the relatively small community of users involved in its development -- an understandable drawback given its status as an independent work. Development is led by the language's creator, is being revamped and is now listed as "oldwinapi" in Nimble.)
Still, Nim helps develop software that eventually needs to be made robust and fast, but without as much of the steep learning curve or cognitive overhead usually associated with existing languages for such development. In that sense it's somewhat closer to Go: It's easy to dive into and start getting results from almost immediately, but with few long-term costs (performance, particularly) later on down the line. While Nim has more in the language than Go, its code tends to be less verbose than Rust's.
Concern is rising regarding the challenge of creating robust software that runs infrastructure and the fast-moving development cycles need languages that complement them. It's hard not to notice the latter exacerbating the former, which explains the rise of languages and development tools that attempt to address those issues. Even if Nim is still in the comparatively early stages, it's worth watching as part of that process.
[This article was edited to correct an inaccuracy about Nim's default garbage collection system. It uses deferred reference counting by default, not a mark-and-sweep system.]