This Month with Nim: May 2021

01 June 2021 The Nim Community

Nim0, a subset of Nim language, with a compiler to a 32-bits RISC CPU and a runtime emulator

Author: Pierre Métras

Nim0 is a toy language similar to Nim but much more limited (no fancy feature X; replace X by generics, templates, closures, imports, etc.). It comes with a one-pass compiler to 32-bit RISC instructions and an emulator, and a few examples to show what you can do with it.

The interesting part in Nim0 is not the language itself but the compiler source in less than 4000 lines of commented code, with references to Niklaus Wirth’s Compiler Construction book that you can follow while reading the book, even if the book talks about Oberon-0. When you have completed the book and added a few features to Nim0 compiler, you’ll be ready to jump into hacking Nim compiler.

Want to try it? Look at the simple instructions and detailed example at pmetras.gitlab.io/nim0.

Nimibook

Authors: @pietroppeter, @clonkk, @hugogranstrom, @zetashift

This month we collaboratively worked on nimibook, a port of mdbook to nim using nimib. Nimibook allows to create a nice looking book from nim code and markdown, making sure that nim code is running correctly and being able to incorporate code outputs in the final book.

The work started with the goal of using nimib to write SciNim/getting-started, a guide for scientific libraries in Nim. We are now close (not there yet) to a working version of nimibook and next month we plan to start using it in SciNim/getting-started. Join us, we are having fun!

Kashae

Author: Jason Beetham

After seeing the Python caching annotation, I was enthuised to make a caching library. Kashae is the result of that enthusiasm, it has many optional features to change it’s behaviour, though still needs some work and to be submitted to Nimble. A small example of using the “unlimited” cache follows:

import kashae
proc fib(n: int): int {.cache.} =
  if n <= 1:
    result = n
  else:
    result = fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

Susta

Author: @ajusa

Susta is a test runner that aids in print statement based testing. You pass it a lists of Nim files to run, and it saves any output from stdout to a file. Then, when you run the tests again, it diffs the output with the saved output and reports any differences. If the changes are what you expected, you can simply accept them to overwrite the old output. It is a simple and easy way to write tests when you can’t be bothered to write unit tests. It especially shines when you want to catch regressions.

I plan on making it language agnostic and adding threading support to run tests in parallel in the near future.

It’s a super simple utility, and I hope folks enjoy using it!

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