We’re happy to announce the March 2025 update for Nim’s package manager and development tooling! This release brings improvements to Nimble, VSCode-Nim, and Nim Language Server.
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The latest release of Nimble, Nim’s package manager, includes various improvements and fixes. But more importantly, it contains the new declarative parser. From Nimble Guide:
Starting in nimble 0.18.0, the declarative parser can be used. It can be activated using the flag --parser:declarative and will become the default parser in the future.
The main advantage of the declarative parser is deterministic dependencies, allowing nimble to build a reliable cache. Another benefit is improved speed, as there is no need to spin up the Nim VM for every dependency.
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To support conditional dependencies when using the declarative parser, the feature block can be used.
For example, Nim has two async backends: std/asyncdispatch, which ships with Nim, and chronos. A library may support both, but ideally, chronos should not be included in dependency resolution when using asyncdispatch. This can be achieved as follows:
feature "chronos":
require "chronos"In this example, chronos will only be installed when the chronos feature is activated.
There are two ways to activate a feature:
By passing a flag to the root package:
nimble --feature:"chronos" installBy activating it in a dependency using the [] operator:
require "awesomeAsyncPackage[chronos]"Multiple features can be activated for a package as follows:
require "awesomeAsyncPackage[chronos, feature2]"We would like to encourage library authors to test their libraries with the declarative parser to ensure compatibility.
For a full list of changes, check out the release notes:
🔗 Nimble v0.18.0 Release Notes
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This update also includes new releases for VSCode-Nim and Nim Language Server, enhancing the Nim development experience. The focus has been on stability.
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We extend our gratitude to the Nim team for their hard work on these improvements, the community for their feedback, the contributors for their contributions, and special thanks to Status for sponsoring the development.
Let us know if you encounter any issues or have feedback. Happy coding! 🚀
It shouldnt try to install nim 2.2.2 but use nim 2.0.8 (if --useSystemNim is not specified). What nimble are you using?
That said, this issue was reported https://github.com/nim-lang/langserver/pull/305 that it just got fixed (the CI should have catched it though).
Anyways, can you retry with nimble install nimlangserver@#head? (you may need to rm -rf ~/pkgcache/githubcom_nimlanglangserver_#head)
If it works for you, we may release a patch in a day or two with other needed fixes if other issues appear
aahh i dont actually have a github acct, sorry :( what i can confirm is that reverting back to v1.8.1 completely fixed the problem for me, i get none of those errors under LSP Notifications that i got with the latest version
I accidentally discovered a problem with vsix packaging. It seems to have mistakenly included every older version of the vsix file.
What nimble are you using?
I've installed the latest nimble with nimble install nimble:
$ nimble --version
Working ⣯
nimble v0.18.0 compiled at 2025-03-19 16:46:17It shouldnt try to install nim 2.2.2 but use nim 2.0.8 (if --useSystemNim is not specified).
It shouldn't but it does nonetheless: https://asciinema.org/a/CesNQij8q4FrM8raHpBsO4hXk
Anyways, can you retry with nimble install nimlangserver@#head? (you may need to rm -rf ~/pkgcache/githubcom_nimlanglangserver_#head)
That worked, thanks!
$ nimlangserver --version
1.10.0