Release candidate 1 for 2.4.0 is finally ready to get tested: https://github.com/nim-lang/nightlies/releases/tag/2026-07-11-version-2-4-aa652d308ee6b408365ee0048d6f84cd7b04f2bc
Backports to the 2.2.x line have been very thorough, so 2.4.0 is a quite strict feature additive release:
- There is a new string implementation available based on C++'s "small string optimization" ideas: Use --strings:sso to enable it.
- With nim ic the incremental compilation feature finally is stable enough to give it a try. However, typically an IC build is slower than a non-IC build. We expect it to catch on and succeed the non-IC builds' performance during the lifetime of 2.4.x. Thousands of lines of code had to be written and refactored to enable this, but there are some design flaws in the code generator left that keeps it from reaching its full potential.
- In the meantime, to reap some benefits from the IC architecture: nim track offers a one-shot command line interface to query a codebase for "find usages" and "goto definition" -- I hope the editor support will pick up, nim track cannot suffer from nimsuggest's crashes, hangs and its unbounded memory consumption!
- 2.4.0 ships the latest Nimble release.
Feel free to ask any questions here.