Nim

This repo 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.

Compiling

Compiling the Nim compiler is quite straightforward. Because the Nim compiler itself is written in the Nim programming language the C source of an older version of the compiler are needed to bootstrap the latest version. The C sources are available in a separate repo here.

The compiler currently 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 higher - x86, x86_64 and ppc64

In reality a lot more are supported, however they are not tested regularly.

To build from source you will need:

gcc 3.x or later recommended. Other alternatives which may work are: clang, Visual C++, Intel's C++ compiler
git or wget

Note: When installing gcc on Ubuntu (and likely other distros) ensure that the build-essentials package is installed also.

If you are on a fairly modern *nix system, the following steps should work:

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

You should then add the bin directory to your PATH, to make it easily executable on your system.

The above steps can be performed on Windows in a similar fashion, the build.bat and build64.bat (for x86_64 systems) are provided to be used instead of build.sh.

The koch tool is the Nim build tool, more koch related options are documented in doc/koch.rst.

Nimble

Nimble is Nim's package manager. For the source based installations where you added Nim's bin directory to your PATH the easiest way of installing Nimble is via:

$ koch nimble

Community

The forum - the best place to ask questions and to discuss Nim.
IRC (Freenode#nim) - a place to discuss Nim in real-time, this is also where most development decision get made!
Gitter allows to discuss Nim from your browser, one click to join. There is a bridge between Gitter and IRC channels.
Stackoverflow

Contributing

We welcome everyone's contributions to Nim. No matter how small or large the contribution is, anything from small spelling fixes to large modules intended to be included in the standard library are accepted. Before you get started, you should know the following about this repositories structure:

bin/, build/ - these directories are empty, but are used when Nim is built.
compiler/ - the compiler source code, all the Nim source code files in this directory implement the compiler. This also includes nimfix, and plugins which live in compiler/nimfix and compiler/plugins respectively. Nimsuggest used to live in the compiler directory also, but was moved to https://github.com/nim-lang/nimsuggest.
config/ - the configuration for the compiler and documentation generator.
doc/ - the documentation files in reStructuredText format.
lib/ - where the standard library lives.
- pure/ - modules in the standard library written in pure Nim.
- impure/ - modules in the standard library written in pure Nim which depend on libraries written in other languages.
- wrappers/ - modules which wrap libraries written in other languages.
tests/ - contains tests for the compiler and standard library, organised by category.
tools/ - the tools including niminst and nimweb, most of these are invoked via koch.
web/ - the Nim website (http://nim-lang.org).
koch.nim - tool used to bootstrap Nim, generate C sources, build the website, documentation and more.

Most importantly, the koch tool can be used to run the test suite. To do so compile it first by executing nim c koch, then execute ./koch tests. The test suite takes a while to run, but you can run specific tests by specifying a category to run, for example ./koch tests cat async.

Make sure that the tests all pass before submitting your pull request. If you're short on time, you can just run the tests specific to your change. Just run the category which corresponds to the change you've made. When you create your pull request, Travis CI will verify that all the tests pass anyway.

If you're looking for things to do, take a look at our issue tracker. There is always plenty of issues labelled Easy, these should be a good starting point if this is your first contribution to Nim.

You can also help with the development of Nim by making donations. You can do so in many ways:

Gratipay
Bountysource
Bitcoin - 1BXfuKM2uvoD6mbx4g5xM3eQhLzkCK77tJ

Finally, if you have any questions feel free to submit a question on the issue tracker, on the Nim forum, or on IRC.

License

The compiler and the standard library are licensed under the MIT license, except for some modules where the documentation suggests otherwise. This means that you can use any license for your own programs developed with Nim, allowing you to create commercial applications.

Read copying.txt for more details.

Build Status

Build Waterfall

	Linux	Windows	Mac
x86
x86_64
arm