With the '--debugger:native' flag, the Nim debugging experience isn't too bad. Not on the level of Java or C#, but you can set breakpoints, step in/over/out of code and inspect or watch variables without having to look at C code. There are some issues with type visualization (to see the contents of a string you have to evaluate something like '(char*)variable->data') but Nim ships with a gdb plugin that should help (I haven't actually tried it).
It could definitely be better, and hopefully some day it will be, but I use Nim in a debugger quite frequently and it usually works out pretty well.
It was roughly 3-4 years ago the last time I tried it. Happy to hear they made good progress since then.
Well there's major drawback here:
> nlvm does not:
- understand C - as a consequence, header, emit and similar pragmas will not work - neither will the fancy importcpp/C++ features
- support all nim compiler flags and features - do file bugs for anything useful that's missing
With this LLVM backend, that doesn't work, and it doesn't support JS (which probably isn't a big deal to most people).
That means you can't do stuff like this:
type
VectorIterator {.importcpp: "std::vector<'0>::iterator".} [T] = object
# std::vector<int>::iterator x;
var x: VectorIterator[cint]
https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#foreign-function-inter...
https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#implementation-specifi...
Very nice. Last time I experimented with Nim the lack of this was the single biggest dealbreaker.