Version 1.6.6 released

The Nim team is happy to announce version 1.6.6, our third patch release for Nim 1.6.

Version 1.6.6 is a result of three months of hard work, and it contains 55 commits, bringing some general improvements over 1.6.4.

Besides all the bugfixes (you can see the list of them at the bottom of this post), we have focused on having the standard library use consistent styles for variable names so it can be used in projects which force a consistent style with --styleCheck:usages option. Also, ARC/ORC are now considerably faster at method dispatching, bringing its performance back on the level of the refc memory management.

We would recommend to all of our users to upgrade and use version 1.6.6.

Installing Nim 1.6

New users

Check out if the package manager of your OS already ships version 1.6.6 or install it as described here.

Existing users

If you have installed a previous version of Nim using choosenim, getting Nim 1.6.6 is as easy as:

$ choosenim update stable

Alternatively, you can download Nim 1.6.6 from our nightlies builds.

Donating to Nim

We would like to encourage you to donate to Nim. The donated money will be used to further improve Nim by creating bounties for the most important bugfixes and features.

You can donate via:

If you are a company, we also offer commercial support.

Bugfixes

These reported issues were fixed:

  • Fixed “std.streams fails to compile with TCC compiler on Windows and –cpu:amd64” (#16326)
  • Fixed “Compiler version 1.6.0 does not work on Windows XP” (#19038)
  • Fixed “os.putEnv does not compile on cpp backend on Windows” (#19292)
  • Fixed “JS target defines gcc” (#19059)
  • Fixed “static int __tcc_cas( function in JavaScript output when having CC = tcc” (#19330)
  • Fixed “CPU detection for i386” (#19577)
  • Fixed “not flushing stdout in MSYS” (#19584)
  • Fixed “Nim-1.6 segfault” (#19569)
  • Fixed “Nim compiler crashing when using control flow statements inside try-catch block on a closure iterator” (#19575)
  • Fixed “Remove deprecated typo poDemon” (#19631)
  • Fixed “useless overflowChecks runtime check generated even when one of a div b constant” (#19615)
  • Fixed “{.byref,exportc.} types are not output into –header file” (#19445)
  • Fixed “nim check reports incorrect errors for nimscript” (#19440)
  • Fixed “Is there proper way to syntax check .nims file?” (#3858)
  • Fixed “dial ignoring buffered parameter” (#19650)
  • Fixed “nim dump and other information obtaining commands execute top-level exec statements in nims files” (#8219)
  • Fixed “Bug using nested loops in closure iterators” (#18474)
  • Fixed “Import/except doesn’t work on devel” (#18986)
  • Fixed “Can’t check if stderr is static” (#19680)
  • Fixed “View of seq[T] when T has seq attribute won’t iter with ARC/ORC, but len returns correct number of elements” (#19435)
  • Fixed “StringStream created from string segfaults on write when when using arc” (#19707)
  • Fixed “minor NimNode comment repr() regression 1.0.10 to 1.2.9” (#16307)
  • Fixed “Method dispatch is slow” (#18612)
  • Fixed “Possibly spurious no tuple type for constructor error” (#18409)
  • Fixed “Error with anonymous tuples passed to concept function arguments.” (#19730)

The complete list of changes is available here.