I think Nim absolutely has a place competing with Rust too.

It has several tunable GCs allowing for great flexibility there, and also supports running with no GC at all. It compiles to C that will compile nearly anywhere C does. It produces smaller binaries, and it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint. It's also safe like Rust is, and the compiler will help you catch a ton of errors.

That's not to say that it's competitive at this point in time. It's much more unstable as a language due to not reaching 1.0 yet. They only just (August) received any real kind of funding, allowing them to hire on a new developer but it's still just a handful of core devs and some dedicated contributors. The standard library and the community repo (Nimble) can't compare with Rust's and Cargo in terms of package availability and support.

> it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint

I'm not sure if you were implying that it doesn't, but Rust also supports musl:

    $> rustup target list | rg musl
    aarch64-unknown-linux-musl
    arm-unknown-linux-musleabi
    arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf
    armv5te-unknown-linux-musleabi
    armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
    i586-unknown-linux-musl
    i686-unknown-linux-musl
    mips-unknown-linux-musl
    mipsel-unknown-linux-musl
    powerpc64le-unknown-linux-musl
    x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

I apologize if I worded my post weirdly. It was a list of things that make Nim a competitor to Rust, not things that Nim does that Rust doesn't.

There's a fair bit of overlap for obvious reasons: they're two languages suited for the same tasks, after all :)

mrustc [1] compiles rust to optimized C also.

1. https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

Nim, D and Rust are in the same league, as a "C/C++ replacement"