Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewisenerd | Hacker News Reader

Oh!

I have another use-case; first-class (easier-than-others?) cross-compilation support.

I had to build a one-off tool that was a a glorified "curl wrapper" with validations, for Windows; on a Mac. Wrote a simple nim script, cross-compiled for Windows, and it's been fine and dandy for a year now :)

I'm sure other languages support this (golang?), but Google's SEO suggested nim-lang.org

View on HN

This, for sure. For my work I wrote a dynamic library in Nim. The library is loaded by an application written in C, and I needed it to work on both Windows and Linux (Windows for customers, Linux for myself and the server back-end). Setting up a Docker container that runs the entire build and integrates well into the existing build-system we had was fairly straight forward. All Nim needs to cross-compile is a C compiler that can do it (in my case that was MinGW). So now I'm happily running the same Nim dynamic library compiled to both a DLL and a .so.

To confirm, that’s two dynamic libraries, right?

Yes, it's compiled into two different libraries. Nim hasn't magically made cross-platform dynamic libraries. But the code for both libraries is the same, just compiled for two different platforms.

Also interfacing with C and Javascript libraries is as easy as it gets. Do you need a .dll/.so/.dyn? No problem, the same Nim code will deals with it in a few and clear lines.

I agree with most of the OP's shortcomings. Cross compilation hasn't been a huge problem for me, pretty easy to pull off. But they've been looking into using zig as a cross compiler. Kind of confused as to the current status of the effort though . https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/13757

Carp also has open pull request for using zig as a cross compiler FWIW

Thanks, I'll add that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com