hello_musl

Besides @elcritch's and @pjmlp's excellent points {language "level" is vague & all compilers translate}, C as a backend target has other virtues (though is by no means The Only Way). E.g., TinyC/tcc optimizes for time to compile (it is a single pass over its input) not generated object code qualities like run-time/file-size. This can give Nim code almost interpreter-like edit-compile-debug devel cycles, but even just changing the default gcc -Og to gcc -O0 can be a huge improvement. [1] (`passL:"-lm" --mm:markAndSweep` and recently `--threads:off` became necessary for tcc due to atomics/C11 dependencies, but it is already a kind of "debugging compilation mode".) Similarly, work on space-saving/alternate libc's like musl [2] can be leveraged, [3] although using `config.nims`/NimScript can also lengthen compile-times by 100 milliseconds

It's certainly possible! You just need to know which compiler to use. For example, I used musl-gcc to compile a static binary that can run on any 64-bit GNU/Linux type OS. See my recent post https://scripter.co/nim-deploying-static-binaries/. Download and run binary to try: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/hello_musl/releases (prints just "Hello, world!"). I plan to release similar binary for my ntodo[0] project, that will make API calls to fetch/set tasks in Todoist. [0]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ntodo