The Nim Programming Language

The Nim programming language is a compiled language, with strong static typing.

The rest of the Handbook will assume that Nim-by-example was read.

Nim compilation process is in 2 phases, first lowering the Nim code to C, C++ or Javascript. Then for machine code, rely on the C/C++ compiler to produce the final code.

Nim can target any combination of C compiler, host OS and hardware architecture as long as the C compiler supports it.

Installing

Nim can be installed via:

• A Linux distribution package manager or Homebrew on MacOS
• Instructions at https://nim-lang.org/install.html
• Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/nimlang/nim/
• Choosenim https://github.com/dom96/choosenim

Nim Vagrant https://github.com/status-im/nim-vagrant is unmaintained but might help setting up your own virtualized environment.

We target Nim 1.2.2 and should be compatible with the latest stable, Nim 1.2.4

Casings

Nim has unusual partial case insensitivity for identifiers. The rationales being:

• Preventing bugs when using SDL_QUIT instead of SDL_Quit.
• Having consistent casing in a codebase even when relying on external dependencies with different casing.

The convention used in Nim-Beacon-Chain is:

• snake_case for fields and procedures names from the Ethereum spec
• MACRO_CASE for Ethereum spec constants
• PascalCase for all types (Ethereum or additional)
• camelCase for our own additional code
• PascalCase for our additional constants

In summary, we respect the Ethereum spec for Ethereum specified identifiers and use Nim NEP-1 for the rest.

Checking the C code

By default the intermediate C code produced by the Nim compiler is available at

• $HOME/.nim/compiled_project_d on UNIX systems
• $HOME/nimcache/compiled_project_d on Windows

The suffix _d indicates a debug build, the suffix _d indicates a release build

Compiler options

At the time of writing, NBC targets Nim v1.2.2 compiler. The build system is at https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-build-system No patching is done at the moment on the Nim compiler, we use vanilla v1.2.2 upstream.

Nim compiler offers debug, release with -d:release and danger with -d:danger flag.

The debug and -d:release build differ by, the verbosity of stacktraces and passing -O3 or equivalent to the C compiler.

Runtime checks (overflow, array bounds checks, nil checks, ...) are still included in -d:release build. We also choose to have verbose stacktraces in NBC.

A danger build optimizes away all runtime checks and debugging help like stackframes. This might have a significant impact on performance as it may enable optimizations that were not possible like optimizing tail calls. This is not used in NBC.

References

• Nim by example:

  • https://nim-by-example.github.io/getting_started/

• The Nim Manual, is a specification of how Nim should behave
  https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html

• Nim tutorials

  • https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut1.html
  • https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut2.html
  • https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut3.html

• Nim for

  • the C programmer: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-C-programmers
  • Python programmer: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Nim-for-Python-Programmers

Further resources are collected at:

• https://nim-lang.org/learn.html

Compiler configuration

• Compiler User Guide: https://nim-lang.org/docs/nimc.html

Style Guide

• https://nim-lang.org/docs/nep1.html