The number is kept a secret but it's more than one and less than three core compiler developers. There are also paid people working on nimsuggest and Nimble.
That means the progress is slower than I would like but my comfort is that the code is actually really long lived. Do it right and you only need to do it once and compiler code ages like wine as its surface area with the messy outside world is very limited.
That doesn't mean that today's compiler code aged particularly well but it's getting refactorings.
So, it's a number between 1..2
Have the number of contributors increased after the release of Nim 2.0?
The number of compiler devs is > 1 and < 3.
Did the number of contributors increase? I don't think so; we are doomed, better use TypeScript. No, Swift! No, Rust! Argh... ;-)
"surface area with the messy outside world is very limited"
such a comfort zone
better use TypeScript. No, Swift! No, Rust!
I think the era of imperative programming languages is ending.
And we going to see the rise of declarative languages, in the next couple of years. You describe the problem, maybe even in english, or mix of formal lang and english. And let the AI define the implementation.
And instead of static code, you get live and evolving code base. With every improvement in AI, your implementation going to be automatically improved.
And way, way faster progress. And all those zero-overhead performance optimisations.
Imperative languages - there not going to be anything new or interesting, it's a thing of a past. Like assembler.