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Comment by mikebenfield | Hacker News Reader

I think Nim may be the most underdocumented project I've ever used. I spent a week or so with it, but quickly grew extremely frustrated as I was constantly scouring old forum posts to learn how to use the basic features of the language. That is not a tolerable situation for me.

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I've been working with nim on some toy projects recently myself. I don't think there is a lack of documentation so much as there is bad organization of the documentation. Pretty much everything in the language and it's standard library is documented somewhere. You can use the documentation index to find it.

Here are some links you may find useful if you decide to try again:

Documentation index: https://nim-lang.org/docs/theindex.html (everything)

Official Tutorial: https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut1.html

Standard library documentation: https://nim-lang.org/docs/lib.html

Language Manual: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html (information on syntax, type system, GC, etc.)

Compiler user guide: https://nim-lang.org/docs/nimc.html

Backend docs: https://nim-lang.org/docs/backends.html (nim cmpiles to C, C++ and js)

Built in templating docs: https://nim-lang.org/docs/filters.html

How to tune the GC: https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html

Development tools docs: https://nim-lang.org/docs/tools.html

More about the compiler: https://nim-lang.org/docs/intern.html

All of these links come from nim-lang.org's documentation page here: https://nim-lang.org/documentation.html

I think the idea has great potential, but the absence of a strong community is killing it :(

Nah, I've always found quick answers to questions in the forum.

Simplicity is under-rated. With Nim, most problems are easy to grasp just by reading source code. And when I don't understand the docs, I look for a simple example at http://rosettacode.org/

If you don't mind me asking, what in particular were you searching for? I agree that Nim's documentation needs a lot of love but would like suggestions on what specifically you had trouble with so that I can at least improve that (for now) :)

Unfortunately I can't remember the details at this point. There was something I couldn't figure out with the `new` function and heap allocation in general, and I also got frustrated trying to understand some things about the type system. I do know one thing about `new` was that it took me forever to figure out how to allocate anything on the heap at all, only to find a couple lines about `new` in the API docs. At least, I think that's what happened.

Sorry I can't be more specific.

Curious as to when you had this problem, I thought the manual was fairly descriptive: https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#types-reference-and-po...

I'm sure your original question was more nuanced, but for anyone wondering about this basically any ref type is heap allocated, and you do this by calling new, so:

  type MyType = ref object
  var myHeapObject: MyType
  new myHeapObject

Pretty much anything else is stack allocated and doesn't need the GC if I remember right.

No worries, thank you for replying :)

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