Let's get this thread up to help potential newcomers to the language.
How can you get start with Nim development in 2025? What are the must have VS Code extensions, tools you should install and version to use. Always good to have an evergreen thread for this.
The official Nim extension is the recommended VSCode plugin and is more up to date than the one from nimsaem.
VSCode is the most popular Nim IDE.
LSP server works well with neovim and sublime text but it requires a bit more manual setup.
Helix supports Nim surprisingly well; even better than Neovim imho.
Just make sure you have nimlangserver in your path and it will get picked up automatically (if you're using a recent enough version) and that's basically it; no configuration needed.
Some QoL options can be added to ~/.config/helix/config.toml:
[editor.lsp]
display-messages = true
[editor.whitespace.render]
space = "all"
tab = "all"
newline = "none"
[editor.whitespace.characters]
space = "·"
tab = "→"Hi! I noticed Continue, so I quickly went to try it out. Have you tried the @Docs section? It looks interesting.
https://docs.continue.dev/customize/deep-dives/docs
I didn't find Nim, but I know it's something the community or Araq itself can fix. With that in mind, it seems like having high level documentation can be very helpful.
https://github.com/continuedev/continue/blob/main/core/indexing/docs/.
I was amused to read that Araq himself is an AI enjoyer, that's great!
Local First 🤝
In my experience, the AIs are _way better at programming in the most mainstream languages than in those that are not as popular...
I don't program in other languages so I can't compare but Claude 3.7 is amazing with Nim code. :-)
It feels that in the age of LLMs is really important to ensure that there is some kind of dataset that teaches the LLMs how to code in nim.
I don't think it's needed, quite probably, the AI will be able to make such training set for themsleve in a year or two. Just give it some hardware and ask to do it. :)
I don't program in other languages so I can't compare but Claude 3.7 is amazing with Nim code. :-)
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/google-is-winning-on-every-ai-front
Google Gemini writes the best code overall according to metrics. This is my experience, it's professional quality. I'm not sure about Nim specifically. When I tried the same Nim task between Claude and Gemini, they both worked, but Gemini was more sophisticated and optimized using a broader range of features and techniques. It came with drama, it was confused about a function name in the standard library that took time back and forth to resolve. Claude is quick but reminds me of code I might write.