Nim 1.0 releases with improved library, backward compatibility and more

Yesterday, the team at Nim announced Nim version 1.0, a general-purpose, compiled programming language that focuses on efficiency, readability and flexibility.

Major changes in Nim 1.0

Backwards compatibility

The switch -d:nimBinaryStdFiles has been removed in this release and stdin/stdout/stderr are now the binary files again.

In this release, the language definition and compiler are now stricter about gensym'ed symbols in hygienic templates.

Changes made to library

The team has removed unicode.Rune16 in this release as the name ‘Rune16 ’ was wrong.

In Nim 1.0, encodings.getCurrentEncoding distinguishes between the OS's encoding and console's encoding.

In this release, json.parseJsonFragments iterator can speedup JSON processing.

Oid usage has been enabled in hashtables.

std/monotimes module has been added that implements monotonic timestamps.

Compiler

In Nim 1.0, the Nim compiler warns about unused module imports. Users can use a top-level {.used.} pragma in the module that can be importable without giving a warning.

In this version, the Nim compiler nomore recompiles the Nim project via nim c -r if case no dependent Nim file is changed.

Users seem to be excited about this news and are appreciating the efforts taken by the team. A user commented on HackerNews, “Great! I love this language, so simple and powerful, so fast executables!”

Another user commented, “I would have never thought to live long enough to see this happening! I started using Nim in 2014, but abandoned it after a few years, frustrated by the instability of the language and what I perceived as a lack of vision. (In 2014, release 1.0 was said to be "behind the corner".) This release makes me eager to try it again. I remember that the language impressed me a lot: easy to learn, well-thought, and very fast to compile. Congratulations to the team!”