openSUSE has announced that they now provide the latest packages for the Nim language, like Arch Linux, and that the statically typed, imperative programming language now has "first-class citizen" Nim support in openSUSE. According to Nim core developer Dominik Picheta, openSUSE is the first Linux distribution to offer "first-class citizen" support for Nim.
The blog reads: "openSUSE builds include automated testing. Nim's general availability with openSUSE includes backporting and upstream syncing architecture-specific breakage tests with security patches. Nim has a very interesting and vibrant package ecosystem that can Easy development in many ways; from web development to systems programming, from science to data processing. To name a few: extremely fast and parallelized applications can be developed with Weave, front-ends can be developed entirely with Nim with Karax or Jester and backend web applications, and use ArrayMancer to perform heavy computation-based math. On the gaming side, Nim can be used to develop high-performance 3D visualizations and game development with Godot by using Godot-Nim as a bridge.”
Aside from the macro system and runtime efficiency, one of Nim's strengths is its standard library, which, like other languages, covers most of the standard functionality; this includes string handling and formatting, asynchronous code development, networking, and even advanced Language features (like the compiler itself), and NimScript, a subset of Nim built specifically for scripts that can be embedded and executed at runtime.
Additionally, Nim comes with a number of tools included by default. The compiler supports the use of C, C++ and JavaScript as its backend. There are some tools for easy development:
- nim compiler
- nimsuggest (supports language suggestions, autocompletion, error/problem detection, etc.)
- nimgrep (a powerful grep alternative with built-in Nim support to find symbols and inspect the Nim codebase)
- nim-gdb wrapper (gdb support for Nim types)
- nimble (package manager)