As we discovered in my last article, Nim will by default generate C code and then call on a C compiler to actually produce a binary. This might seem like an odd choice, especially in the age of LLVM. However it’s actually not uncommon for languages to compile or transpile into another language. Initially the choice to not use LLVM was simply because it wasn’t as mature back when Nim was created. Though going through…
This is a question which has been asked in various places over the years, and recently on the forum in multiple separate threads. Seeing how I’ve built commercial software with Nim dynamic libraries, I thought I’d chime in with my knowledge. But since there are multiple threads out there and this is a large-ish topic I figured it would be better to do it as a post on here.
As you’re probably aware Nim…
This is a question that has come up time and time again in the IRC channel, when talking to people in person, and in the comment section pretty much every time Nim has an article on Hackernews or one of the bigger programming subreddits. It’s also a question that has been answered a lot of times, both with a short and efficient “no”, but also in longer form. This article will go into some detail…
In the previous article we got a small primer on various kinds of multi-tasking, in this article we'll have a look at possibly the simplest form of this. Namely asynchronous execution. As discussed in the last article asynchronous execution is a way for our programs to tell the hardware to do something, and then do something else while waiting for it to complete the operation. This is great when we want to for example…
This is a series of articles about a topic in the Nim ecosystem that has so far been written fairly little about. Namely threading, asynchronous operation, and communication.
To begin we first need to have a good grasp of the concepts we're going to discuss. There is quite a bit of confusion around all the terms in this space, so let's start with some simple definitions. To put them in context let's first consider how a…