On Ubuntu, I ran
$ sudo apt-get install nim
and it installed nim ok, but it's version 0.12.0 (2015-11-02) [Linux: i386].
Isn't it a bit old? Anybody plans to upgrade it? I mean automatic no-brain installation with apt-get install nim, w/o downloading the sources and compiling them myself.
Thank you.
Ubuntu isn't a rolling distro so all of its packages are usually behind. This is more prominent for some packages like Nim because we release relatively often and each new release has many new features.
There are many ways to get around this. Ubuntu has a concept of PPAs, but I'm not aware of one existing for Nim. For the core team maintaining one of these would be too much, but if you want to get a newer Nim installed via Ubuntu's aptitude you might want to create a PPA for Nim. I'll happily feature it on the Nim website.
Hope this helps :)
It's just an old version in Xenial
I see. Thank you! So it's an old Ubuntu for some reason couldn't find the latest build of Nim = Ubuntu's fault.
PPA
Sorry, I don't understand that. I just tried to see how it's on Ubuntu and since they have nearly automatic install and update, I thought it should have worked smoothly there. Now I see it just didn't. Well, maybe on modern Ubuntu it's better. I'm ok with the manual build.
geo555 you can pick packages from Artful Aardvark (the current stable release) or Bionic Beaver. They both ship 0.17.2 and are imported from Debian. There is also HTML documentation in the nim-doc package.