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12783 :: Nim Installation Questions

• EbubeTheSage (orginal) [2025-04-12T07:08:06+02:00] view original

  Hi, I'm new here. Just created this account a few seconds ago.

  I'm a new Nim developer. Actually, a new developer in general. I just installed Nim a few minutes ago & I don't know which folder to extract the zip file to.

  It's currently in my Downloads folder. Is that wise?

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• Araq (orginal) [2025-04-12T07:46:41+02:00] view original

  Put the unzipped thing into your home dir, maybe under a new directory tools/. Then also add a projects/ directory in your home dir and there you can put your Nim code.

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• EbubeTheSage (orginal) [2025-04-12T09:14:06+02:00] view original

  waiiiit, is this THE Araq??

  Bro, I want you to know you're a legend. I keep hearing you and Andreas as the new Guidos. Big ups man.

  Altho while you're here I'd like to complain that Nim is not beginner friendly tbh. I'm finding it hard to get tools for complete programming novices like myself. But the community is helpful!

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• Araq (orginal) [2025-04-12T11:54:19+02:00] view original

  I'm finding it hard to get tools for complete programming novices like myself.

  Sure but once you got the tooling installed you're rewarded with the only no-bullshit language for beginners:

  1. Nim doesn't make you learn programming paradigms that don't really work well (OOP, FP).
  2. Nim enforces static typing discipline.
  3. Nim enforces code formatting discipline.
  4. Nim doesn't make "count the number of X" tasks a problem worthy of getting a PhD (unlike Haskell).
  5. Nim has useful scoping rules so that you can use global variables without gotchas (unlike Python).
  6. Nim offers a useful standard library.
  7. The whole package is generally well documented.
  8. Compiler errors are reasonable (most of the time).
  9. Memory management is as easy or as hard as you want it to be.
  10. Error handling is as easy or as hard as you want it to be.
  11. Once you grow out of the beginner phase, you don't have to learn an entirely different language for game development, web development, scientific computing...

  ;-)

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• shagrouni (orginal) [2025-04-13T01:28:41+02:00] view original

  I love Nim, really it’s a great language, elegant, clever and practical. I am new and my main frustration now is the fact that i can’t figure it out how to debug my code, inserting a breakpoint and evaluating a variable.

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• crfout (orginal) [2025-04-13T16:55:02+02:00] view original

  The "Nim way" of debugging seems to be the use of

  echo "Checkpoint 13, x is: ", x, " y is: ", y.

  It's cheap, it's easy, it's fast, and it generally gives the results you're looking for.

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• PMunch (orginal) [2025-04-13T20:47:26+02:00] view original

  Doing this at the C level is the same as it would be in C (although the code can be a bit hairy to read without the proper flags). But I would love to see the Nim gdb integration improve. As it stands it doesn't work great

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• Abathargh (orginal) [2025-04-13T21:09:23+02:00] view original

  I wrote it somewhere else in the forum recently, but I had a really good experience with debugging nim in CLion!

  Now that I know it works great I might try and see if it's easy to setup to debug nim on embedded..

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• Clonk (orginal) [2025-04-15T10:50:10+02:00] view original

  If you to use print-debugging then I recommend using the excellent https://github.com/treeform/print print library

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