I used to follow a similar path on FreeBSD and derivatives. But, if you're not needing to monkey with the nim compilers/tools and just want to code in nim, you can simply
pkg install nim
pkg install nimble
I have, for a few recent FreeBSD installs, had version 1.2 installed
it can even be a blog article.
I find the debugging tool blog article much more pleasant to read in a blog post than in the wiki.
thanks for the super detailed guide!! curious though, is there a docker way? docker run -it madworx/netbsd:8.0-x86_64 bash
this one-liner docker run -it phusion/baseimage bash gives you ubuntu 16.04 from osx, and (at least last week, but somehow not today), docker run -it madworx/netbsd:8.0-x86_64 bash gives you netbsd
The NetBSD images are just linux running QEMU as a hypervisor to run a NetBSD VM. Last time I looked at it, the docker images were still using NetBSD 8.1, where NetBSD 9.0 is the current release (released 2020-02-14). I believe the containers also have to run in privileged mode with the KVM device passed through.
As far as I'm aware, there aren't any images set up to do the same for FreeBSD and honestly I think just running a VM yourself is probably easier - especially if you use a Mac! If using a Mac, Docker desktop already uses a VM running Linux under the hood so you'd have macOS Host -> Docker -> Linux VM -> NetBSD VM. In that scenario, I'm not sure the nested netBSD VM running in QEMU would have hardware virtualisation support either so I doubt performance would be anything to write home about.
Of course, the other option is a cheap VPS. RamNode offer a VPS with 512MB RAM and 1 core for $3/mo ($0.0045/hr), or 1Gb RAM and 2 cores for $5/mo ($0.0075/hr). They allow you to upload custom ISOs too. I've currently got a NetBSD VPS running with them that I'm currently setting up to test and work on Nim with.
True, performance will obviously also depend upon the host OS performance as well.
On a side note, I'm very happy to see your PR #14634, thanks for doing the investigative work necessary!