Nim (programming language)

Nim is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, statically typed, compiled, high-level system programming language. It was designed and developed by a team led by Andreas Rumpf. Nim aims to be "efficient, expressive, and elegant", and supports metaprogramming, functional, message passing, procedural, and object-oriented programming paradigms. Nim includes features such as compile-time code generation, algebraic data types, and a foreign function interface (FFI) for interfacing with C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript. It also supports compilation to these same languages as intermediate representations.

Nim is statically typed. It supports compile-time metaprogramming features such as syntactic macros and term rewriting macros. Term rewriting macros enable library implementations of common data structures, such as bignums and matrices, to be implemented efficiently and with syntactic integration, as if they were built-in language facilities. Iterators are supported and can be used as first class entities, as can functions, allowing for the use of functional programming methods. Object-oriented programming is supported by inheritance and multiple dispatch. Functions can be generic and overloaded, and generics are further enhanced by Nim's support for type classes. Operator overloading is also supported. Nim includes multiple tunable memory management strategies, including tracing garbage collection, reference counting, and fully manual systems, with the default being deterministic reference counting with optimizations via move semantics and cycle collection via trial deletion.

[Nim] ... presents a most original design that straddles Pascal and Python and compiles to C code or JavaScript.

— Andrew Binstock, editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobb's Journal, 2014

As of August 2023^[update], Nim compiles to C, C++, JavaScript, Objective-C, and LLVM.

Andreas Rumpf is the designer and original implementer of Nim. He received a diploma in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany. His research interests include hard real-time systems, embedded systems, compiler construction and artificial intelligence.

Nim's initial development was started in 2005 under the name Nimrod and was made public in 2008.

The first version of the Nim compiler was written in Pascal using the Free Pascal compiler. In 2008, a version of the compiler written in Nim was released. The compiler is free and open-source software, and is being developed by a community of volunteers working with Andreas Rumpf. The language was officially renamed from Nimrod to Nim with the release of version 0.10.2 in December 2014. On 23 September 2019, version 1.0 of Nim was released, signifying the maturing of the language and its toolchain. On 1 August 2023, version 2.0 of Nim was released, signifying the completion, stabilization of, and switch to the ARC/ORC memory model.