If you look at the todo.txt you'll see an honest description of the remaining issues to be resolved for a new release. Everything under 0.11.4 should get fixed before a release is made, IMO. Also as vega says, no known showstoppers.
Making a release which attracts newcomers who then encounter problems right away will not help.
Showstopper bugs are indeed blocking a release by their definition. But there is only 2 of them, 1 hard, 1 easy (for me).
More problematic is the lack of an automated release process, every release costs us about 2 days of building and testing. We have instructions and scripts that automate it, but as long as it's not done by our build servers it remains time-consuming. This means that since releasing is expensive, we try to pack as much as possible in the upcoming release -- resulting in last-minute regressions. It's really bad and if somebody finally could make our testing infrastructure produce releases for us it would likely help Nim moreso than any other contribution I can think of. (Ok, ok, throwing money at us won't hurt either ;-).)
> finally could make our testing infrastructure produce
How people can help with that? any guidelines?
> finally could make our testing infrastructure produce
How people can help with that? any guidelines?