We need to be a bit more careful about how we release new things. Babel name has been changed to Nimble--that's ok. But, there is no mention of this in the change log the github site. The name has changed for the github site itself. Instructions refer to nimble. But, much of the information still refers to babel. What is this thing actually called now?
It's minor and I know you are all doing a lot of work. But, nothing will signal to outsiders that the project is a bit ragged like quick changes that aren't made carefully. There has to be nearly perfect care devoted to this kind of outward facing sysadmin stuff. Sure, you can say, hey, only real developers need apply! Just figure it out! (I am certainly not a real developer so I don't make the grade). But, that is not really mature (sorry to be mean and pointed). This may be one of the reasons that, for all of its many awesome virtues, there seems to be no commercial software developer adoption or interest in Nim. Other projects like D and, certainly, Rust aren't all that mature yet but they are gaining some interest. Without that interest, Nim won't attract more contributors and ultimately maybe some "foundation contributors". People kick the tires and say, "Looks interesting; can't bet the ranch on this." Nim deserves more interest because of what it can do, its speed, the clean code it encourages, and its design. We have to be super careful about good housekeeping.
Also, nimble won't compile and build on my machine using nim 0.9.6. I am just following the instructions from the github site. Here are some of the error messages, but there are also innumerable warnings of course:
Error: execution of an external program failed; rerun with --parallelBuild:1 to see the error message
Traceback (most recent call last)
nimble.nim(810) nimble
nimble.nim(785) doAction
nimble.nim(569) install
nimble.nim(475) installFromDir
nimble.nim(424) buildFromDir
tools.nim(18) doCmd
Error: unhandled exception: Execution failed with exit code 256 [ENimble]
Error: execution of an external program failed
This is on Yosemite with the latest release of Xcode, so maybe something broke in Yosemite. How to tell?
Obviously it compiles, but it won't install. Something broken in the directory structure it creates. Maybe I can find some clues to manually move things around.
Also, can "nimble" packages co-exist with "babel" packages? Obviously they are the same packages, but the directory naming is probably going to leave things in separate worlds and not allow coexistence.
Sorry: sloppy.
Finally this is reported by several folks as an issue at github.
Sorry: sloppy.
Yes. However, the regressions that 0.9.6 caused are much more concerning to me than the incredibly sloppy Babel->Nimble transition. The reason for that is that 0.9.6 is an official release and Babel/Nimble is still not part of the release process. Well that's a problem too, of course.
You're right. We should have announced the name change. Apologies. I shall create an announcement now.
Edit: Hopefully this explains some things.
OK. You guys have hearts in right place and doing lots of work.
I am sorry if I am more of an outsider and not technically qualified to contribute in the ways you do.
But, I really want to see Nim succeed.
One of the milestones will be some commercial developers poking around looking for something to move to from c/c++. Maybe too soon right now, but it will be key. they'll need to convince themselves (or their boss, etc) that this would be a good move for their products. Confidence will be key.
Araq: agree that major focus is compiler and std. library reliability
I just posted parallelBuild:1 output over on github
The web page at http://nimrod-lang.org/lib.html shows for me the dummy text "If you are reading this you are missing babelpkglist.js or have javascript disabled in your browser" even after executing the JS to show the babel package list. A 0.9.6 checkout generates through koch web a file at upload/lib.html which properly hides the dummy non JS message. I wonder what's the difference. On the other hand the source checkout generates all documentation with a 0.9.5 version marker…
If http://nimrod-lang.org/lib.html is to be updated, might be worth looking into the JS issue apart from updating the babel name to nimble.