Last night I was able to download and installed Nim 2.2.6 on my Macbook Pro M3 in 3.147 seconds. Just amazing!
It's largely due to a new static page releases.json on the website (see the PR) as nightlies have long had binaries building on Github CI. I used grabnim as @janAkali was super quick in adding support. However support should be coming soon for Nimble and Atlas. Hopefully choosenim as well if anyone wants to dive into it. Also sha checksums are included as well.
-> % nim -v
zsh: command not found: nim
-> % time grabnim 2.2.6
- Cleaning up temporary files...
- Downloading: "https://github.com/nim-lang/nightlies/releases/download/2025-10-31-version-2-2-ab00c56904e3126ad826bb520d243513a139436a/nim-2.2.6-macosx_arm64.tar.xz"
Destination: "/var/folders/sp/0hjz5h7x329fz68wjpg4hx0r0000gn/T/nim-2.2.6-macosx_arm64.tar.xz"
[########################################################] 100% (0 kb/s)
! Download Complete
- Verifying archive checksum... Valid
- Unpacking to: "/Users/elcritch/.local/share/grabnim/nim-2.2.6"
- Cleaning up temporary files...
! Successfully installed nim-2.2.6
- Switching compiler to nim-2.2.6...
! Active Nim compiler version set to: '2.2.6'
grabnim 2.2.6 0.83s user 0.68s system 48% cpu 3.147 total
-> % nim -v
Nim Compiler Version 2.2.6 [MacOSX: arm64]
Compiled at 2025-10-31
Copyright (c) 2006-2025 by Andreas Rumpf
git hash: ab00c56904e3126ad826bb520d243513a139436a
active boot switches: -d:releasePS this has been a personal annoyance for me for years now, and Apple Silicon has been very popular with developers so I'm sure it's annoyed others as well. I also do IoT work and having Nim on a RPi in a few seconds would be awesome. Hopefully it'll make the VSCode plugins work one bit better once Nimble can quickly install the appropriate Nim versions as well.
In my opinion it'd be great if more platforms or debug versions of the compiler were added as well. Who wants to add builds for Araq's favorite platform RISC-V?! Jk ;)
Araq's favorite platform RISC-V?
Must ... resist... RISC-V is a ridiculously poor architecture that could only be invented at a university.