Mastering Nim

Nim is a general-purpose programming language inspired by Python, C++ and Lisp. Its most important features are type and resource safety, meta programming and combining readability with syntactic convenience. Learning a programming language is a huge time investment. Why should you learn Nim? Nim rewards you with a single coherent language that can be used for everything and it works well on everything: It runs on virtually every operating system and on web browsers, as well as on tiny embedded devices and even on GPUs. Nim's complexity is still very manageable, this book tries to cover Nim completely in about 300 pages. Some describe Nim as a "better Python with types, macros and C's speed". Cover Table of Contents Preface History and theory behind Nim Who is this for Structure of the book Part I - Introduction to Nim via graphics 1 - Introduction 2 - Drawing a line 2.1 - Drawing horizontal and vertical lines 2.1.1 - Drawing a line using one point, length, direction 2.1.2 - Drawing a line by specifying start and end 3 - Rendering Text 4 - Sequences 5 - Parameter passing and mutability 6 - Let vs Var 7 - Iterators 7.1 - Yield 8 - Generics 9 - Templates 10 - Macros Part II - Nim language specification 11 - Basic terms 12 - Lexical analysis 12.1 - Notation used in this chapter 12.2 - Indentation 12.3 - Comments 12.4 - Multiline comments 12.5 - Identifiers & Keywords 12.6 - Identifier equality 12.7 - String literals 12.8 - Triple quoted string literals 12.9 - Raw string literals 12.10 - Generalized raw string literals 12.11 - Character literals 12.12 - Numeric Literals 12.12.1 - Custom Numeric Literals 12.13 - Operators 12.14 - Other tokens 12.15 - Unicode Operators 13 - Syntax 13.1 - Associativity 13.1.1 - Precedence 13.2 - Dot-like operators 14 - Declarations and scope rules 15 - Modules 15.1 - Export marker 15.2 - Module processing 15.3 - Import statement 15.4 - Include statement 15.5 - Module names in imports 15.6 - Collective imports from a directory 15.7 - Pseudo import/include paths 15.8 - From import statement 15.9 - Export statement 15.10 - Scope rules 15.10.1 - Block scope 15.10.2 - Tuple or object scope 15.10.3 - Module scope 16 - Type system 16.1 - Ordinal types 16.2 - Pre-defined integer types 16.3 - Integer literals 16.4 - Subrange types 16.5 - Pre-defined floating-point types 16.5.1 - Nan and Inf checks 16.6 - Boolean type 16.7 - Character type 16.8 - Enumeration types 16.9 - Overloadable enum field names 16.10 - String type 16.11 - cstring type 16.12 - Structured types 16.13 - Array and sequence types 16.14 - Open arrays 16.15 - Varargs 16.16 - Unchecked arrays 16.17 - Tuples and object types 16.18 - fields and fieldPairs iterators 16.19 - Object construction 16.20 - Object variants 16.21 - cast uncheckedAssign 16.22 - Set type 16.22.1 - Bit fields 16.23 - Reference and pointer types 16.24 - Nil 16.25 - Procedural type 16.26 - Calling conventions 16.27 - Distinct type 16.27.1 - borrow annotation 16.28 - Auto type 16.29 - static[T] 16.30 - typedesc[T] 16.31 - typeof 17 - Type relations 17.1 - Type equality 17.2 - Subtype relation 17.3 - Convertible relation 17.4 - Assignment compatibility 18 - Constant expressions 19 - Overload resolution 19.1 - Overloading based on 'var T' 19.2 - Lazy type resolution for untyped 19.3 - Varargs matching 19.4 - Overload disambiguation 20 - Statements and expressions 20.1 - Statement list expression 20.2 - Discard statement 20.3 - Void context 20.4 - Var statement 20.5 - Let statement 20.6 - Tuple unpacking 20.7 - Const statement 20.8 - Type section 20.9 - Static statement/expression 20.10 - If statement 20.11 - Case statement 20.12 - When statement 20.13 - Return statement 20.14 - Yield statement 20.15 - Block statement 20.16 - Break statement 20.17 - While statement 20.18 - Continue statement 20.19 - Using statement 20.20 - If expression 20.21 - When expression 20.22 - Case expression 20.23 - Block expression 20.24 - Table constructor 20.25 - Type conversions 20.26 - Type casts 20.27 - The addr operator 20.28 - The unsafeAddr operator 21 - Procedures 21.1 - Method call syntax 21.2 - Properties 21.3 - Indexing 21.4 - Command invocation syntax 21.5 - Closures 21.5.1 - Creating closures in loops 21.6 - Anonymous procs 21.7 - Func 21.8 - Non-overloadable built-ins 21.9 - Var parameters 21.10 - Var return type 22 - Methods 22.1 - Static method calls via procCall 23 - Iterators and the for statement 23.1 - Implicit items/pairs invocations 23.2 - First-class iterators 24 - User definable conversions 24.1 - Converters 25 - Exception handling 25.1 - Try statement 25.2 - Try expression 25.3 - Except clauses 25.4 - Defer statement 25.5 - Exception hierarchy 25.6 - Raise statement 26 - Effect system 26.1 - Exception tracking 26.2 - EffectsOf annotation 26.3 - Tag tracking 26.4 - Side effects 26.5 - GC safety effect 27 - Generics 27.1 - Is operator 27.2 - Type Classes 27.3 - Implicit generics 27.4 - Generic inference restrictions 27.5 - Symbol lookup in generics 27.5.1 - Open and Closed symbols 27.6 - Mixin statement 27.7 - Bind statement 27.8 - Delegating bind statements 27.9 - Templates 27.10 - Typed vs untyped parameters 27.11 - Passing a code block to a template 27.12 - Varargs of untyped 27.13 - Symbol binding in templates 27.14 - Identifier construction 27.15 - Template parameter lookup rules 27.16 - Hygiene in templates 27.16.1 - Inject and gensym 27.17 - Method call syntax limitations 28 - Macros 28.1 - Macros API 28.2 - BindSym 28.3 - For loop macros 29 - Lifetime-tracking hooks 29.1 - =destroy hook 29.2 - =wasMoved hook 29.3 - =sink hook 29.4 - =copy hook 29.5 - =dup hook 29.6 - =trace hook 29.7 - Move semantics 29.8 - Swap 29.9 - Sink parameters 29.10 - Rewrite rules 29.11 - Object and array construction 29.12 - Destructor removal 29.13 - Self assignments 29.14 - Lent type 29.15 - The .cursor annotation 29.16 - Cursor inference / copy elision 29.17 - Hook lifting 29.18 - Hook generation 29.19 - nodestroy pragma 29.20 - Copy on write 29.21 - Practice 30 - Strict funcs 31 - View types 31.1 - Path expressions 31.2 - Start of a borrow 31.3 - End of a borrow 31.4 - Reborrows Part III - Mastering Macros 32 - Introduction 33 - AST introspection 33.1 - Typed vs untyped ASTs 34 - AST creation 35 - Collect macro 36 - strformat 37 - strscans 38 - HTML trees 39 - Advice Part IV - Mastering Parallelism 40 - Introduction 41 - Threading 41.1 - createThread 41.2 - Single worker, single channel 41.3 - Multiple workers, single channel 42 - spawn 42.1 - Return values 42.2 - Sharing memory 43 - Isolated data 44 - Smart pointers 45 - Parallel for each and reduce 45.1 - parMap 45.2 - parReduce 45.3 - parFind 46 - Final advice 46.1 - What to avoid 46.2 - What to use Appendix A - Grammar Appendix B - Nim standard library cheat sheet B.1 - Integers B.2 - Strings B.3 - Sequences B.4 - Bit sets B.5 - Hashes B.6 - Hash sets B.7 - Hash tables B.8 - Optionals B.9 - String formatting B.10 - Algorithms B.11 - OS B.12 - JSON B.13 - Unicode Index