Nim partners with Status.im

07 August 2018 Nim Team

Status + Nim

We’re incredibly excited to announce the new partnership between Status and Nim. Status is developing an open source mobile DApp browser and messenger for Ethereum.

The Status team has chosen the Nim programming language as a base for the implementation of a brand new research project: a sharding client for Ethereum. The project is named Nimbus, it is open source and available on GitHub. You can read more about this project as well as the reasons why Status chose Nim in the corresponding Status announcement article.

As the developers of Nim we are very proud to see it used for this project. We hope that this partnership will encourage other developers to adopt Nim for their project and that it will give software companies the confidence to develop products using Nim.

The Partnership

The partnership will see Status support the Nim team with funding and resources needed to stay focused on the development of the Nim programming language. The Nim team has so far received many generous donations from other software teams as well as from independent developers who believe in the project. These donations have given us the ability to do many things such as pay for the hosting costs of our servers, organize a Nim stand at the FOSDEM conference and spend our free time developing Nim and related projects.

Unfortunately the donations are not currently enough for any of us to commit to working on Nim full-time. With Status’ help this is no longer the case. We will now be able to stay focused on the development of the Nim programming language. In addition, we plan to hire at least 2 full-time developers. These developers will be tasked with fixing bugs, responding to issues, and of course developing the compiler, the standard library and the tooling.

Despite this partnership, Nim remains an independent project, with plans being discussed in the open on GitHub, our forum and on IRC. Decisions are as usual left to our BDFL, Andreas Rumpf, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Our Roadmap

Our primary goal is to release Nim version 1.0.0, which signals our long overdue commitment to a stable language and standard library that will preserve backwards compatibility for years to come.

We won’t make any commitments to a release date. But a detailed milestone tracking all the issues that need to be resolved for v1.0.0 is available here.

With Status’ support our development towards version 1.0.0 will accelerate rapidly. We will also have more man-power to handle the recently increased activity on our issue tracker.

Beyond the roadmap

Beyond our current roadmap we would like to encourage our community to get more involved in the development of Nim. We’re currently considering a grants program for Nim, similar to Google Summer of Code, where we will hire developers to work on specific Nim-related projects.

Some examples for these grants:

  • Improve the nimsuggest tool to support the common “language server protocol” that every text editor and IDE is starting to speak.
  • Improve Nim’s package manager, Nimble, to support reproducible builds.
  • Improve Nim’s tooling so that the result of macro expansions becomes easier to understand and follow.

We are extremely excited to continue developing Nim with renewed vigour and are very thankful for the generous support from the Status team.

For more information and questions, join us on this forum thread: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/4113.