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.

Community

• The forum - the best place to ask questions and to discuss Nim.
• #nim IRC Channel (Freenode) - a place to discuss Nim in real-time. Also where most development decisions get made.
• Gitter - an additional place to discuss Nim in real-time. There is a bridge between Gitter and the IRC channel.
• Stack Overflow - a popular Q/A site for programming related topics that includes posts about Nim.

Compiling

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

• Windows (Windows XP or greater) - x86 and x86_64
• Linux (most, if not all, distributions) - x86, x86_64, ppc64 and armv6l
• Mac OS X (10.04 or greater) - x86, x86_64 and ppc64

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 repository.

Next, to build from source you will need:

• A C compiler such as gcc 3.x/later or an alternative such as clang, Visual C++ or Intel C++. It is recommended to use gcc 3.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).

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 (in the place of sh build.sh you should substitute build.bat on x86 Windows or build64.bat on x86_64 Windows):

$ git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim.git
$ cd Nim
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nim-lang/csources.git
$ cd csources
$ sh build.sh
$ cd ../
$ bin/nim c koch
$ ./koch boot -d:release

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

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.rst file.

Nimble

nimble is Nim's package manager and it can be acquired from the nim-lang/nimble repository. Assuming that you added Nim's bin directory to your PATH, you may install Nimble from source by running koch nimble within the root of the cloned repository.

Contributing

We welcome everyone's contributions to Nim independent of how small or how large they are. Anything from small spelling fixes to large modules intended to be included in the standard library are welcome and appreciated. Before you get started contributing, you should familiarize yourself with the repository structure:

• bin/, build/ - these directories are empty, but are used when Nim is built.
• compiler/ - the compiler source code. Also includes nimfix, and plugins within compiler/nimfix and compiler/plugins respectively. Nimsuggest was moved to the nim-lang/nimsuggest repository, though it previously also lived within the compiler/ directory.
• config/ - the configuration for the compiler and documentation generator.
• doc/ - the documentation files in reStructuredText format.
• lib/ - the standard library, including:
  • pure/ - modules in the standard library written in pure Nim.
  • impure/ - modules in the standard library written in pure Nim with dependencies written in other languages.
  • wrappers/ - modules which wrap dependencies written in other languages.
• tests/ - contains categorized tests for the compiler and standard library.
• tools/ - the tools including niminst and nimweb (mostly invoked via koch).
• web/ - the Nim website.
• koch.nim - tool used to bootstrap Nim, generate C sources, build the website, and generate the documentation.

If you are not familiar with making a pull request using GitHub and/or git, please read this guide.

Ideally you should make sure that all tests pass before submitting a pull request. However, if you are short on time, you can just run the tests specific to your changes by only running the corresponding categories of tests. Travis CI verifies that all tests pass before allowing the pull request to be accepted, so only running specific tests should be harmless.

If you're looking for ways to contribute, please look at our issue tracker. There are always plenty of issues labelled Easy; these should be a good starting point for an initial contribution to Nim.

You can also help with the development of Nim by making donations. Donations can be made using:

• Gratipay
• Bountysource
• Bitcoin

If you have any questions feel free to submit a question on the Nim forum, or via IRC on the #nim channel.

License

The compiler and the standard library are licensed under the MIT license, except for some modules which explicitly state otherwise. As a result you may use any compatible license (essentially any license) for your own programs developed with Nim. You are explicitly permitted to develop commercial applications using Nim.

Please read the copying.txt file for more details.

Copyright © 2006-2017 Andreas Rumpf, all rights reserved.