thomastjdev / choosenim

choosenim

choosenim installs the Nim programming language from official downloads and sources, enabling you to easily switch between stable and development compilers.

The aim of this tool is two-fold:

• Provide an easy way to install the Nim compiler and tools.
• Manage multiple Nim installations and allow them to be selected on-demand.

Typical usage

$ choosenim stable
  Installed component 'nim'
  Installed component 'nimble'
  Installed component 'nimgrep'
  Installed component 'nimsuggest'
   Switched to Nim 0.16.0
$ nim -v
Nim Compiler Version 0.16.0 (2017-01-08) [MacOSX: amd64]

Installation

Windows

Download the latest Windows version from the releases page.

Execute the self-extracting archive, or extract the zip archive and run the runme.bat script. Follow any on screen prompts and enjoy your new Nim and choosenim installation.

Unix

curl https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh -sSf | sh

Optional: You can specify the initial version you would like the init.sh script to install by specifying the CHOOSENIM_CHOOSE_VERSION environment variable.

How choosenim works

Similar to the likes of rustup and pyenv, choosenim is a toolchain multiplexer. It installs and manages multiple Nim toolchains and presents them all through a single set of tools installed in ~/.nimble/bin.

The nim, nimble and other tools installed in ~/.nimble/bin are proxies that delegate to the real toolchain. choosenim then allows you to change the active toolchain by reconfiguring the behaviour of the proxies.

The toolchains themselves are installed into ~/.choosenim/toolchains. For example running nim will execute the proxy in ~/.nimble/bin/nim, which in turn will run the compiler in ~/.choosenim/toolchains/nim-0.16.0/bin/nim, assuming that 0.16.0 was selected.

How toolchains are installed

Due to lack of official binaries for most platforms, choosenim downloads the source and builds it by default. This operation is only performed once when a new version is selected.

In the future choosenim will download binaries whenever they are available.

Dependencies

	Windows	Linux	macOS (*)
C compiler	Downloaded automatically	gcc/clang	gcc/clang
OpenSSL	>= 1.0.2k	>= 1.0.2k	N/A
curl	N/A	N/A	Any recent version
zlib	Statically linked in binary	Any recent version	Any recent version

* Many macOS dependencies should already be installed. You may need to install a C compiler however.

The dependencies shown are recommendations only. You may need to install them, when you do ensure that they are in your PATH.

OpenSSL version can be checked by executing openssl version.

Usage

Analytics

Check out the analytics document for details.

Troubleshooting

Development notes

Auto-extracting installer for Windows was created using WinRAR. Instructions available here.

License

MIT