nimscripter VS vscode-nim

> What does this mean? There's a runtime VM or compile time VM?

Compile time VM. It's used to run macros / templates / concepts. You can also run most code at compile time in a `static` block except for stuff that needs C calls. You can also compile the VM into a program and use it as a runtime VM (see https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter) which I do in my GUI lib. NIR should enable the compile time VM to run faster too, and possibly use JIT'ed code.

Checkout Nim! It does much of what you describe and its great. The core language is fairly small (not quite lua simple but probably ML comparable). It compiles fast enough that a Nim repl like `inim` is useable to check features and for basic maths, though it requires a C compiler, but TCC [4] works perfectly. Essentially Nim + tcc is pretty close to your description, IMHO. Though I'm not sure TCC supports non-x86 targets.

I've never used it but Nim does support some hot reloading as well [3]. It also has a real VM if you want to run user scripts and has a nice library for it [1]. Its not quite Lua flexible but for a generally compiled language its impressive.

Recently I made a wrapper to embed access to the Nim compilers macros at runtime [2]. It took 3-4 hours probably and still compiles in 10s of seconds despite building in a fair bit of the compiler! It was useful for making a code generator for a serializer format. Though I'm not sure its small enough to live on even beefy m4/m7 microcontrollers. Though I'm tempted to try.

1: https://github.com/beef331/nimscripter

You may fare better hooking VSCode to nimlangserver:

https://github.com/saem/vscode-nim#nim-lanugage-server-integ...

nimlangserver is an implementation of Language Server Protocol with the goal to make nim IDE experience more mature. The main difference between nimlangserver and the existing nimlsp is that nimlangserver runs nimsuggest in a separate process and that nimlangserver is using a newly introduced version of nimsuggest v3(see bellow). nimlangserver is currently integrated in VScode via vscode-nim and in Emacs via lsp-mode but adding integraion with other editors should be trivial.

admittedly the editor support is far away from perfect, but that particular issue just sounds like https://github.com/saem/vscode-nim/issues/80

To all those wondering about IDE support , the actively maintained VSCode extension is :

https://github.com/saem/vscode-nim

The default extension suggested by VSCode which have over 43k downloads in un-maintained for Eons and it won't work.

Here is the link : https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nimsaem....

@dom96 can you pin this somewhere on the forum or website ?

UPDATE: improved highlighting rules you would get this code highligting more details https://github.com/saem/vscode-nim/issues/49