Ebook: Nim in Action

contents

Part 1 The basics of Nim

1 Why Nim?

1.1 What is Nim?

1.1.1 Use cases

1.1.2 Core features

1.1.3 How does Nim work?

1.2 Nim’s benefits and shortcomings

1.2.1 Benefits

1.2.2 Areas where Nim still needs to improve

1.3 Summary

2 Getting started

2.1 Nim syntax

2.1.1 Keywords

2.1.2 Indentation

2.1.3 Comments

2.2 Nim basics

2.2.1 Basic types

2.2.2 Defining variables and other storage

2.2.3 Procedure definitions

2.3 Collection types

2.3.1 Arrays

2.3.2 Sequences

2.3.3 Sets

2.4 Control flow

2.5 Exception handling

2.6 User-defined types

2.6.1 Objects

2.6.2 Tuples

2.6.3 Enums

2.7 Summary

Part 2 Nim in practice

3 Writing a chat application

3.1 The architecture of a chat application

3.1.1 What will the finished application look like?

3.2 Starting the project

3.3 Retrieving input in the client component

3.3.1 Retrieving command-line parameters supplied by the user

3.3.2 Reading data from the standard input stream

3.3.3 Using spawn to avoid blocking input/output

3.4 Implementing the protocol

3.4.1 Modules

3.4.2 Parsing JSON

3.4.3 Generating JSON

3.5 Transferring data using sockets

3.5.1 What is a socket?

3.5.2 Asynchronous input/output

3.5.3 Transferring data asynchronously

3.6 Summary

4 A tour through the standard library

4.1 A closer look at modules

4.1.1 Namespacing

4.2 Overview of the standard library

4.2.1 Pure modules

4.2.2 Impure modules

4.2.3 Wrappers

4.2.4 Online documentation

4.3 The core modules

4.4 Data structures and algorithms

4.4.1 The tables module

4.4.2 The sets module

4.4.3 The algorithms

4.4.4 Other modules

4.5 Interfacing with the operating system

4.5.1 Working with the filesystem

4.5.2 Executing an external process

4.5.3 Other operating system services

4.6 Understanding and manipulating data

4.6.1 Parsing command-line arguments

4.7 Networking and the internet

4.8 Summary

5 Package management

5.1 The Nim package manager

5.2 Installing Nimble

5.3 The nimble command-line tool

5.4 What is a Nimble package?

5.5 Installing Nimble packages

5.5.1 Using the install command

5.5.2 How does the install command work?

5.6 Creating a Nimble package

5.6.1 Choosing a name

5.6.2 A Nimble package’s directory layout

5.6.3 Writing the .nimble file and sorting out dependencies

5.7 Publishing Nimble packages

5.8 Developing a Nimble package

5.8.1 Giving version numbers meaning

5.8.2 Storing different versions of a single package

5.9 Summary

6 Parallelism

6.1 Concurrency vs. parallelism

6.2 Using threads in Nim

6.2.1 The threads module and GC safety

6.2.2 Using thread pools

6.2.3 Exceptions in threads

6.3 Parsing data

6.3.1 Understanding the Wikipedia page-counts format

6.3.2 Parsing the Wikipedia page-counts format

6.3.3 Processing each line of a file efficiently

6.4 Parallelizing a parser

6.4.1 Measuring the execution time of sequential_counts

6.4.2 Parallelizing sequential_counts

6.4.3 Type definitions and the parse procedure

6.4.4 The parseChunk procedure

6.4.5 The parallel readPageCounts procedure

6.4.6 The execution time of parallel_counts

6.5 Dealing with race conditions

6.5.1 Using guards and locks to prevent race conditions

6.5.2 Using channels so threads can send and receive messages

6.6 Summary

7 Building a Twitter clone

7.1 Architecture of a web application

7.1.1 Routing in microframeworks

7.1.2 The architecture of Tweeter

7.2 Starting the project

7.3 Storing data in a database

7.3.1 Setting up the types

7.3.2 Setting up the database

7.3.3 Storing and retrieving data

7.3.4 Testing the database

7.4 Developing the web application’s view

7.4.1 Developing the user view

7.4.2 Developing the general view

7.5 Developing the controller

7.5.1 Implementing the /login route

7.5.2 Extending the / route

7.5.3 Implementing the /createMessage route

7.5.4 Implementing the user route

7.5.5 Adding the Follow button

7.5.6 Implementing the /follow route

7.6 Deploying the web application

7.6.1 Configuring Jester

7.6.2 Setting up a reverse proxy

7.7 Summary

Part 3 Advanced concepts

8 Interfacing with other languages

8.1 Nim’s foreign function interface

8.1.1 Static vs. dynamic linking

8.1.2 Wrapping C procedures

8.1.3 Type compatibility

8.1.4 Wrapping C types

8.2 Wrapping an external C library

8.2.1 Downloading the library

8.2.2 Creating a wrapper for the SDL library

8.2.3 Dynamic linking

8.2.4 Wrapping the types

8.2.5 Wrapping the procedures

8.2.6 Using the SDL wrapper

8.3 The JavaScript backend

8.3.1 Wrapping the canvas element

8.3.2 Using the Canvas wrapper

8.4 Summary

9 Metaprogramming

9.1 Generics

9.1.1 Generic procedures

9.1.2 Generics in type definitions

9.1.3 Constraining generics

9.1.4 Concepts

9.2 Templates

9.2.1 Passing a code block to a template

9.2.2 Parameter substitution in templates

9.2.3 Template hygiene

9.3 Macros

9.3.1 Compile-time function execution

9.3.2 Abstract syntax trees

9.3.3 Macro definition

9.3.4 Arguments in macros

9.4 Creating a configuration DSL

9.4.1 Starting the configurator project

9.4.2 Generating the object type

9.4.3 Generating the constructor procedure

9.4.4 Generating the load procedure

9.4.5 Testing the configurator

9.5 Summary

Appendix A Getting help

A.1 Real-time communication

A.2 Forum

A.3 Other communication methods

Appendix B Installing Nim

B.1 Installing the Nim compiler

B.1.1 Getting up-to-date installation info

B.1.2 Building from source

B.2 Installing the Aporia IDE

B.3 Testing your new development environment

B.4 Troubleshooting

B.4.1 Nim command not found

B.4.2 Nim and C compiler disagree on target architecture

B.4.3 Could not load DLL