> And no, the standard library does not rely on GC like in D.

This isn't correct, it relies heavily on GC.

You're right, a more hands-on approach is needed. We've discussed it a bit, and no opposition has been raised to using +q more often.

I'd guess that pulling that try-catch out of the loop would make things go much faster. Nim doesn't use 0-overhead exceptions, so setjmp needs to be called each time the try-catch is entered.

You should also use the re module, PEGs is not nearly as optimized as PCRE.

I’ll try that later, though the Nim version is fast enough after using -d:release flag.

I'm personally not too happy about this, but there are restrictions on the use of underscores:

- You cannot have two underscores in a row

- You cannot have a leading underscore

Most discussions about major things occur in IRC in #nim on freenode.

It looks like mingw provides a non-installer version of the binaries, although it is (unintentionally) well hidden in the web. http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%2...

I see that, thanks. It's a zipped dump of all pieces for all OSes. If you're a Nim dev, please don't let this dissuade you from eventually releasing a portable "ready to go" version of Nim for Windows.

I know myself and my compatriots bail at any language that forces Cygwin or MinGW and has its own installer on top of that. I'll never get to try OCaml, Haskell, Kitten [which looks really interesting but relies on Haskell], and a number of other new languages just because of the install burden.

IMO, if trial and adoption are your goals then as little friction as possible to get to "hello world" is a good route. (And an unzip to the directory of your choice then a double click on "Test_Hello_World.bat" are about as good as you could get.)

It's not the same thing at all, but could you use Virtualbox to run a Linux VM on Windows, and play around with languages in that?

I'd like to clarify that http://nimbuild.nim-lang.org/tut1.html is for the devel branch. You probably want to use http://nim-lang.org/tut1.html if you're going to use the newly released version.