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13895 :: NimPack Stats — A health check for the Nim ecosystem

• bung (orginal) [2026-05-03T10:03:37+02:00] view original

  Hi all,

  I've been working on NimPack — a mirror/index of the Nim package registry — and wanted to share the new Stats page with you.

  Beyond the download numbers, it surfaces some useful health signals about packages in the ecosystem:

  Largest Packages

  A sorted list of packages by total tarball size. Big tarballs are often a sign of:

  • Bundled binaries (e.g. nimwkhtmltox ships wkhtmltopdf — 201 MB).
  • Vendored third-party dependencies (e.g. sdl3_nim bundles SDL3 headers + a static lib).
  • Unexcluded assets (e.g. GIFs/PNGs sitting in src/private/).
  • Test data not under tests/ (fixtures/samples included in the release tarball)

  If you maintain a package on this list, it might be worth adding an .gitattributes export-ignore or moving large files out of the release path.

  Repo Not Found

  105 packages reference repositories that no longer exist (deleted, renamed, or made private). NimPack generates a packages.json.patch you can apply to remove them from the upstream list.

  The goal is to make package health visible so authors can clean things up before users hit slow installs or broken links. If you have ideas for other metrics that would be useful, let me know.

  Repo: github.com/nim-community/nsheep

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