Version 1.0 released

23 September 2019 The Nim Team

Today is the day. The Nim Team is very proud and happy to announce the much-anticipated version 1.0 of the language.

Nim has always been focused on providing a compiled statically typed language focusing on efficiency, readability and flexibility.

Version 1.0 marks the beginning of a stable base which can be used in the coming years, knowing that the future versions of Nim won’t break the code you have written with the current version.

Nim has built a warm and welcoming community which is ready to help newcomers to the language.

If you are one of the new users, check out our learning resources and try Nim in our playground.

This release includes many changes, including bug fixes and some language additions. All changes are documented in the v1.0.0 changelog available here. Included as well is the latest release of Nimble, v0.11.0, the changelog for which is available here.

The stability guarantee

Version 1.0 is now a long-term supported stable release that will only receive bug fixes and new features in the future, as long as they don’t break backwards compatibility.

The 1.0.x branch will receive bug fixes for as long as there is demand for them. New features (which do not break backwards compatibility) will continue in steadily advancing 1.x branches.

Our goal is to make sure that code which compiled under Nim 1.0 continues to compile under any stable Nim 1.x version in the future.

What is included under the stability guarantee?

Backwards compatibility covers only the stable fragment of the language, as defined by the manual.

The compiler still implements experimental features which are documented in the “experimental manual”. These features are subject to changes which may be backwards incompatible; some of the features included under this umbrella are concepts, the do notation and a few others. There are also modules in the stdlib which are still considered unstable - these have been marked with an “Unstable API” in their docs.

You can use experimental features, even in production, but be aware that these are not as fleshed out as we would like them to be.

Exceptions to the rule

We of course have to concede that there are exceptions. In certain serious cases, for example if a security vulnerability is discovered in the standard library, we reserve the right to break code which uses it.

Installing Nim 1.0

New users

Check out if the package manager of your OS already ships version 1.0 or install it as described here.

Existing users

If you have installed a previous version of Nim using choosenim, getting Nim 1.0 is as easy as:

$ choosenim update stable

Contributors

Over the years, more than 500 people contributed to the Nim codebase, implementing new features, fixing bugs and issues, writing documentation, and so on. The Nim team would like to thank all of you who helped us build Nim to become what it is today.

We would also want to thank all people who have created Nimble packages, extending what is possible to do with Nim. The number of Nimble packages has been steadily growing, and in August 2019 we broke the 1000 package milestone! We are optimistic that with this release we will see even bigger growth of new and exciting packages.

If you would like to help Nim grow consider donating via Open Collective or other services.