Nim

This repository contains the Nim compiler, Nim's stdlib, tools, and documentation. For more information about Nim, including downloads and documentation for the latest release, check out Nim's website or bleeding edge docs.

Community

• The forum - the best place to ask questions and to discuss Nim.
• #nim IRC Channel (Libera Chat) - a place to discuss Nim in real-time. Also where most development decisions get made.
• Discord - an additional place to discuss Nim in real-time. Most channels there are bridged to IRC.
• Gitter - an additional place to discuss Nim in real-time. There is a bridge between Gitter and the IRC channel.
• Matrix - the main room to discuss Nim in real-time. Matrix space contains a list of rooms, most of them are bridged to IRC.
• Telegram - an additional place to discuss Nim in real-time. There is the official Telegram channel. Not bridged to IRC.
• Stack Overflow - a popular Q/A site for programming related topics that includes posts about Nim.
• GitHub Wiki - Misc user-contributed content.

Compiling

The compiler currently officially supports the following platform and architecture combinations:

Operating System	Architectures Supported
Windows (Windows XP or greater)	x86 and x86_64
Linux (most distributions)	x86, x86_64, ppc64, and armv6l
Mac OS X (10.4 or greater)	x86, x86_64, ppc64, and Apple Silicon (ARM64)

More platforms are supported, however, they are not tested regularly and they may not be as stable as the above-listed platforms.

Compiling the Nim compiler is quite straightforward if you follow these steps:

First, the C source of an older version of the Nim compiler is needed to bootstrap the latest version because the Nim compiler itself is written in the Nim programming language. Those C sources are available within the nim-lang/csources_v4 repository.

Next, to build from source you will need:

• A C compiler such as gcc 6.x/later or an alternative such as clang, Visual C++ or Intel C++. It is recommended to use gcc 6.x or later.
• Either git or wget to download the needed source repositories.
• The build-essential package when using gcc on Ubuntu (and likely other distros as well).
• On Windows MinGW 4.3.0 (GCC 8.10) is the minimum recommended compiler.
• Nim hosts a known working MinGW distribution:
  • MinGW32.7z
  • MinGW64.7z

Windows Note: Cygwin and similar POSIX runtime environments are not supported.

Then, if you are on a *nix system or Windows, the following steps should compile Nim from source using gcc, git, and the koch build tool.

Note: The following commands are for the development version of the compiler. For most users, installing the latest stable version is enough. Check out the installation instructions on the website to do so: https://nim-lang.org/install.html.

For package maintainers: see packaging guidelines.

First, get Nim from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim.git
cd Nim

Next, run the appropriate build shell script for your platform:

• build_all.sh (Linux, Mac)
• build_all.bat (Windows)

Finally, once you have finished the build steps (on Windows, Mac, or Linux) you should add the bin directory to your PATH.

See also bootstrapping the compiler.

See also reproducible builds.

Koch

koch is the build tool used to build various parts of Nim and to generate documentation and the website, among other things. The koch tool can also be used to run the Nim test suite.

Assuming that you added Nim's bin directory to your PATH, you may execute the tests using ./koch tests. The tests take a while to run, but you can run a subset of tests by specifying a category (for example ./koch tests cat async).

For more information on the koch build tool please see the documentation within the doc/koch.md file.

Nimble

nimble is Nim's package manager. To learn more about it, see the nim-lang/nimble repository.

Contributors

This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute.

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