Nim Community Survey 2024 Results

23 January 2025 The Nim Team

The Nim community survey 2024 has been open for two months, and we have received 367 responses – less than in previous years, but we’ll still try to draw conclusions about our users and their habits. Before we go into details, we would like to thank all the people who took the time to respond. We really appreciate the feedback!

The goal of this survey was primarily to determine how our community is using Nim, in order to better understand how we should be improving it.

Do you use Nim?

Based on the answer to this question, the respondents were divided into two groups that each received a separate set of questions.

Approximately three quarters of the respondents use Nim (40% frequently, 36% occasionally), while the remaining quarter is divided between people who never used Nim (7%) and people who stopped using Nim (17%).

Of those people who don’t use Nim, the most frequent reasons are: “Nim seems immature, not ready for production”, “Nim doesn’t have libraries I need”,”Nim doesn’t have enough learning materials”, and “Nim seems too risky for production”, in that order.

Users

Compared to the response from last year, our user-base has more Nim experience than before. With 57% of users who are using Nim for at least two years and only 15% new users (using Nim less than a year), it seems that we’re not attracting enough new users.

A typical Nim user, just as in previous years, would be a software developer from Europe.

Besides Europe (more than half of our users), our users mostly come from North America and Asia. We see a slight decline of software developers (41% vs 49% last year), while there is an increase of freelancers and business owners.

We have users from all age groups and all levels of programming experience, proving that Nim can be used both by beginners and veteran programmers.

Similar to last year, 33% Nim users are older than 40, 18% younger than 24. The experience is also similar to last year: 55% users having at least 10 years of experience and just 6% users with less than 2 years of experience.

Same as previously, things that people like about Nim the most are: performance/speed and syntax, syntax, ease of use, and self-contained binaries.

VS Code continues to dominate. In the second place is Vim/Neovim, followed by Sublime Text, Emacs and IntelliJ.

Nim versions

We’re glad to see that the large majority of users are using the latest stable version (2.2.x).

We can partially attribute this to the mostly painless upgrade process:

Using Nim

The upward trend started the last year is continuing – more than 28% of our respondents use Nim for the majority of time (60% or more), which is a 40% increase from last year’s 20% (and it was just 16% the year before).

Although the numbers are low, we are seeing an upward trend: slightly more users are using Nim at work than previously.

The change from 2023 responses is that embedded is now ahead of JavaScript.

Learning Nim

This year we only wanted to see the responses of Nim-newcomers, to see what learning materials are still “fresh” and still used in 2024, but from the amount of responses we see that even some our more experienced users answered this question :)

The most popular learning resource are the official tutorials, followed by “Nim by Example”. “Nim Basics” is in the third place, surpassing “Nim in Action” and “Mastering Nim” books. Rosetta Code examples is also a popular choice as a learning resource

Just like in the previous survey, the most wanted types of learning materials are code examples and written tutorials.

If someone in our community is willing to work on Nim, but has no idea what to do, these tutorials would be a good start.

Nim in 2025 and beyond

Each year improving the tooling is getting more and more votes, and this year it has become the top priority to fix, according to our users.

Thanks to our partnership with Status, it is one of our main priorities for 2025.

Similar to the last year, 2/3 of our users find it very important to work on the compiler bugs. We will continue to work on it, and we appreciate any community effort on this: we already have several individuals continuously helping us with fixing compiler bugs (thank you!), and we’d benefit from more.

These results are slightly better than last year (documentation 2021, learning materials 2021). When it comes to learning materials, where we mostly lean on the community content (for this to improve we need your involvement!), people want to see more written tutorials and code examples.

Last words

Thank you to each and every one of you who took the time to answer this survey. Your time is precious and we are deeply thankful that you used it to share your feedback.

Please remember that you do not need to wait for a survey in order to give us feedback; of course you’re more than welcome to wait if you wish, but ideally share your feedback with us immediately. We can be found in various places - see the community page for links and instructions on how to get in touch.

If you would like to help us in our 2025 plans, consider contributing or making a donation. You can donate via Open Collective.

If you are a company, we also offer commercial support. Please get in touch with us via [email protected]. As a commercial backer, you can decide what features and bugfixes should be prioritized.