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The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language
will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good
name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
-- D. E. Knuth
**This page is about the Nimrod programming language, which combines Lisp's
power with Python's readability and C's performance.**
Welcome to Nimrod
-----------------
**Nimrod** is a new statically typed, imperative
programming language, that supports procedural, object oriented, functional
and generic programming styles while remaining simple and efficient.
A special feature that Nimrod inherited from Lisp is that Nimrod's abstract
syntax tree (*AST*) is part of the specification - this allows a powerful
macro system which allows domain specific languages.
Nimrod is a compiled, garbage-collected systems programming language
which has an excellent productivity/performance ratio. Nimrod's design
focuses on the 3E: efficiency, expressiveness, elegance (in the order of
priority).
.. container:: snippet
*Nimrod looks like this:*
.. code-block:: nimrod
import strutils
echo "Type in a list of ints of ints (separate by whitespace): "
let tokens = stdin.readLine.split
echo tokens.each(parseInt).max, " is the maximum."
Nimrod is efficient
===================
* Native code generation (currently via compilation to C), not dependent on a
virtual machine: **Nimrod produces small executables without dependencies
for easy redistribution.**
* A fast **non-tracing** garbage collector that supports soft
real-time systems (like games).
* System programming features: Ability to manage your own memory and access the
hardware directly. Pointers to garbage collected memory are distinguished
from pointers to manually managed memory.
* Zero-overhead iterators.
* Cross-module inlining.
* Dynamic method binding with inlining and without virtual method table.
* Compile time evaluation of user-defined functions.
* Whole program dead code elimination: Only *used functions* are included in
the executable.
* Value-based datatypes: For instance, objects and arrays can be allocated on
the stack.
Nimrod is expressive
====================
* **The Nimrod compiler and all of the standard library are implemented in
Nimrod.**
* Built-in high level datatypes: strings, sets, sequences, etc.
* Modern type system with local type inference, tuples, variants,
generics, etc.
* User-defineable operators; code with new operators is often easier to read
than code which overloads built-in operators. For example, a
``=~`` operator is defined in the ``re`` module.
* Macros can modify the abstract syntax tree at compile time.
Nimrod is elegant
=================
* Macros can use the imperative paradigm to construct parse trees. Nimrod
does not require a different coding style for meta programming.
* Macros cannot change Nimrod's syntax because there is no need for it.
Nimrod's syntax is flexible enough.
* Statements are grouped by indentation but can span multiple lines.
Indentation must not contain tabulators so the compiler always sees
the code the same way as you do.
Nimrod plays nice with others
=============================
* The Nimrod Compiler runs on Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X.
Porting to other platforms is easy.
* **The Nimrod Compiler can also generate C++ or Objective C for easier
interfacing.**
* There are lots of bindings: for example, bindings to GTK2, the Windows API,
the POSIX API, OpenGL, SDL, Cario, Python, Lua, TCL, X11, libzip, PCRE,
libcurl, mySQL and SQLite are included in the standard distribution.
* A C to Nimrod conversion utility: New bindings to C libraries are easily
generated by ``c2nim``.
Roadmap to 1.0
==============
Version 0.9.x
* first class iterators
* 2-phase type system for better interaction between macros, templates
and overloading
* the syntactic distinction between statements and expressions will be
removed
* the binding rules for generics and templates will change
* exception tracking
* the effect system will be extended
* the need for forward declarations may be removed