0cdca3a0cd
This PR modernises the NEP1 style guide to prefer hanging indent over
vertial alignment for long code statements while still allowing
alignment in legacy code.
The change is based on research and study of existing style guides for
both braced and indented languages that have seen wide adoption as well
as working with a large Nim codebase with several teams touching the
same code regularly.
The research was done as part of due diligence leading up to
[nph](https://github.com/arnetheduck/nph) which uses this style
throughout.
There are several reasons why hanging indent works well for
collaboration, good code practices and modern Nim features:
* as NEP1 itself points out, alignment causes unnecessary friction when
refactoring, adding/removing items to lists and otherwise improving code
style or due to the need for realignment - the new recommendation aligns
NEP1 with itself
* When collaborating, alignment leads to unnecessary git conflicts and
blame changes - with hanging indent, such conflicts are minimised.
* Vertical alignment pushes much of the code to the right where often
there is little space - when using modern features such as generics
where types may be composed of several (descriptively named) components,
there is simply no more room for parameters or comments
* The space to the left of the alignemnt cannot productively be used for
anything (unlike on the right, where comments may be placed)
* Double hanging indent maintaines visual separation between parameters
/ condition and the body that follows.
This may seem like a drastic change, but in reality, it is not:
* the most popular editor for Nim (vscode) already promotes this style
by default (if you press enter after `(`, it will jump to an indent on
the next line)
* although orthogonal to these changes, tools such as `nph` can be used
to reformat existing code should this be desired - when done in a single
commit, `git blame` is not lost and neither are exsting PRs (they can
simply be reformatted deterministically) - `nph` is also integrated with
vscode.
* It only affects long lines - ie most code remains unchanged
Examples of vertical alignment in the wild, for wildly successful
languages and formatters:
* [PEP-8](https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/#indentation)
*
[black](https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/the_black_code_style/current_style.html#how-black-wraps-lines)
* [prettier](https://prettier.io/docs/en/)
The above examples are useful mainly to show that hanging-indent
_generally_ is no impediment to efficient code reading and on the whole
is an uncontroversial choice as befits the standard library.
(cherry picked from commit c4f98b7696)
Nim
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Next, to build from source you will need:
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gitorwgetto download the needed source repositories. - The
build-essentialpackage when usinggccon Ubuntu (and likely other distros as well). - On Windows MinGW 4.3.0 (GCC 8.10) is the minimum recommended compiler.
- Nim hosts a known working MinGW distribution:
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Note: The following commands are for the development version of the compiler. For most users, installing the latest stable version is enough. Check out the installation instructions on the website to do so: https://nim-lang.org/install.html.
For package maintainers: see packaging guidelines.
First, get Nim from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim.git
cd Nim
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build_all.sh(Linux, Mac)build_all.bat(Windows)
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See also bootstrapping the compiler.
See also reproducible builds.
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tests/- contains categorized tests for the compiler and standard library.tools/- the tools includingniminst(mostly invoked viakoch).koch.nim- the tool used to bootstrap Nim, generate C sources, build the website, and generate the documentation.
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