HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
nim-works
nimskull
Nim2022–2025
nim-works / nimskull

nimskull

An in development statically typed systems programming language; with sustainability at its core. We, the community of users, maintain it.

9Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
347GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An in development statically typed systems programming language; with sustainability at its core. We, the community of users, maintain it.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-01-07 19:40:02 UTC to 2025-10-31 15:47:28 UTC.

0123452022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

11 sources
The compiler team has never had more than three people at any time, but both the language and its feature set are impressive. I don't know whether they got any sponsorship. Now that the two most prolific developers are primarily working on Nimony, I wonder whether the stable Nim repository will get enough contributions or bug fixes. The stable compiler repo has a fork https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull/ . It’s unfortunate that developers have different opinions.
In A review of Nim 2: The good and bad with example code
If I remember correctly, main reason for forking was that Nim BDFL was writing lazy commit messages and old codebase was hard to navigate around. Some small part of community forked the language and trying to rewrite the compiler. According to readme they're not trying to replace Nim, but to create new language with Nim as base. Not sure how usable it's right now or will it ever be. I also want to point out that Araq quickly took the criticism and his commits look a lot better now. Also, core Nim team is currently working on their own rewrite of Nim compiler, called Nimony, that should evolve into Nim 3. Refs: fork - https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull commit 'drama' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32021299#32023998 nimony - https://github.com/nim-lang/nimony
In Koto Programming Language
> Unfortunately there seems to be a big "civil war" happening right now in Nim land I believe the war is already over, the other side forked the language and seems to move in their own direction to create something new - https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull . That's probably for the better. I've been around Nim communtiy around a year and I haven't seen any major conflicts break out since these people left. Nim is still actively developed and a joy to use. And even the creator of the language, deemed as dictator or asshole by some, comes off only as grumpy old man (show me an old man who isn't grumpy, duh). Who also realizes his flaws and is willing to compromise.
In V Language Review (2023)
There's a looming feeling that C++17 is really going to be the last version of C++ (practically, in production). The Vasa is now half-sunk [0][1], but the alternatives are yet to be truly born. The current issues surrounding the language standards: - The important but half-baked features of C++20 that has never really been polished enough for actual production usage (modules, coroutines) - Unnecessary "hyper-modern" C++ features which are dead on arrival (ranges) - The dramatic increase in build times due to the STL library (which are accelerated by those hyper-modern C++ features) [2] - The fleeing of LLVM/Clang engineers to other projects (as you've said, Apple engineers shifting work to Swift, and Google abandoning Clang and moving to Carbon). - Implosions in the ISO committee (notably the controversy surrounding the rape convict) It's
Read the rest
really not looking good, but there aren't that much alternatives so I think people will just stick to C++17 for the moment. Listing the worthwhile competitors: - Rust is a bit too awkward to use in many cases where C++ is used (particularly with unsafe Rust), and inherits some of the hyper-modern complexities/insanities of C++. - Zig is still too unstable, they just finished reworking the compiler - Jai is not even released to the public - D might be a candidate but IMO they should really commit 100% fully for GC-less betterC mode... - Nim still has many warts and unbaked features, and also there was a split in the compiler team [3] [0] https://www.aristeia.com/TalkNotes/C++vstheVasa2-ups.pdf [1] https://www.stroustrup.com/P0977-remember-the-vasa.pdf [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/o94gvz/what_happened_w... [3] https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull
In A Tour of C++ (Third edition)
I started programming in Nim around 2015 and still write code in it from time to time. At this point I would have a tough time suggesting the language to anyone for much. While you can certainly accomplish almost any programming task with Nim, how much frustration you will encounter fighting the compiler and broken / under-specified language features and semantics might be a turn-off. There are other major warts with Nim, which I'll outline briefly below. 1) Nim's leadership is awful and has always been historically. Those in charge of managing the community are more interested in their personal reputation's and resumes than they are actually contributing working software to the language's ecosystem. Even the BDFL treats Nim like their own personal compiler R&D playground. There are so many broken features in Nim which never see the light
Read the rest
of day or never get removed. 2) Continuing to expand on the point above, the Nim compiler has become insanely difficult to work on. As more and more half-baked features have been added to the language, the situation has only worsened. There are many would-be contributors who have come into the community only to leave completely frustrated or appalled by the lack of interest in improving the situation from those leading the community. 3) The development path is driven by leadership and not the community, and leadership has no plan. This was extremely evident last year when Araq and others were asked for a roadmap for Nim and they admitted to not having one, and basically wrote one up in a forum thread. Araq and dom96 and a few others, especially those who have been brave enough to actually deploy Nim code in production (looking at you status.im) tend to dictate what gets worked on or fixed. There is no coordination amongst folks working on initiatives. You can look at the `fusion` project, which was started by Nim's leadership, drew contributors in, and then was abandoned by leadership while maintainers were left on the hook to keep things afloat until they too dumped the project. Things have gotten so bad, that a hard fork has been in development since last year, and many of the more senior community members or those who have been around for a bit have migrated there: https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull Nim's community now consists of mostly new members or folks who weren't really active in it before, but maybe used Nim. Of course, the leadership remains in place, but there are only a handful of folks remaining that have been around for more than a year or two. Mostly those who bit the bullet on using Nim in production or built large projects with Nim and are stuck maintaining them. My advice would be to look elsewhere.
In Nim Version 1.6.6 Released

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.