=========================================== Questions and Answers =========================================== General ======= What is Nimrod? --------------- Nimrod is a new statically typed, imperative programming language, that supports procedural, functional, object oriented 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 can be used to create domain specific languages. Nimrod does not sacrifice flexibility for speed. You get both. .. Don't give me that marketing crap. What is Nimrod? -------------------------------------------------- Nimrod = Mutable value based datatypes + static binding + sugar to make this programming modell as convenient as possible How is Nimrod licensed? ----------------------- The Nimrod compiler is GPL licensed, the runtime library is LGPL licensed. This means that you can use any license for your own programs developed with Nimrod. If I receive enough requests with good arguments, I may change the license of Nimrod to the BSD license. How stable is Nimrod? --------------------- The compiler is in development and some important features are still missing. However, the compiler is quite stable already: It is able to compile itself and a substantial body of other code. Until version 1.0.0 is released, slight incompabilities with older versions of the compiler may be introduced. Compilation =========== Execution of GCC fails (Windows) -------------------------------- On Windows the configuration file ``config\nimrod.cfg`` assumes that GCC is in ``$nimrod\dist\mingw\bin``: This is where the Windows installer puts GCC. If you delete the line ``gcc.path = r"$nimrod\dist\mingw\bin"``, Nimrod uses the GCC from your ``PATH`` environment variable. If you cannot modify ``$nimrod\config\nimrod.cfg``, copy ``$nimrod\config\nimrod.cfg`` to ``$APPDATA\nimrod.cfg`` and modify ``$APPDATA\nimrod.cfg`` instead. To determine what ``$APPDATA`` means for your Windows account, use the shell command:: echo %APPDATA% How do I use a different C compiler than the default one? --------------------------------------------------------- Edit the ``config/nimrod.cfg`` file. Change the value of the ``cc`` variable to one of the following: ============== ============================================ Abbreviation C/C++ Compiler ============== ============================================ ``dmc`` Digital Mars C++ ``wcc`` Watcom C++ (now unsupported!) ``bcc`` Borland C++ (now unsupported!) ``vcc`` Microsoft's Visual C++ ``gcc`` Gnu C ``pcc`` Pelles C (now unsupported!) ``lcc`` Lcc-win32 (now unsupported!) ``tcc`` Tiny C ``llvm_gcc`` LLVM-GCC compiler ``icc`` Intel C++ compiler ``ucc`` Generic UNIX C compiler ============== ============================================ If your C compiler is not in the above list, try using the *generic UNIX C compiler* (``ucc``). If the C compiler needs different command line arguments try the ``--passc`` and ``--passl`` switches. Unsupported compilers contain serious bugs that keep them from bootstrapping Nimrod. The linker outputs strange errors about missing symbols ------------------------------------------------------- I have seen this bug only with the GNU linker. The reason for this unknown. Try recompiling your code with the ``--force_build`` command line switch. Why is compilation so slow? --------------------------- There are two reasons for this: (1) Nimrod always recompiles **everything** (but only calls the C compiler for modules that changed). In a future version, only modules that have changed will be recompiled. (2) The C compiler that is called by Nimrod may be slow. Especially GCC's compile times are not very heady. On Linux you may be able to get `Tiny C `_ to work. TCC has excellent compile times. You should not use TCC for producing the release version though, as it has no optimizer. Note that from version 0.7.10 onwards the default build produces an optimized binary.