A lot of previous contributors to Nim are currently working on an experimental fork due to disagreements with the development of the official compiler: https://github.com/nim-works/nimskull

Was totally unaware of this. The Readme:

> For now it's closer to an alternative with most deviations appearing in the standard library, mostly in the form of deleting much of it.

Yikes. I've found that languages with a small standard library have deep dependency trees for imported packages. I hope this is a stepping stone to a different standard library, rather than an end goal in-and-of itself.

Actually the phrasing in the readme is not correct - I will change it later, but now I want to say that the objective is not deleting "much" of it, but rather cleaning up old and deprecated modules, or providing alternative solutions (for things like os/json that historically were a point of friction).

> A lot of previous contributors

Not really. The fork looks pretty dormant.

I think better phrasing would indeed be something like "several former core developers" - of course we can't really measure up to the size of the original community, and don't yet have any paid developers (like Araq and narimiran [1] in the mainline - although since the end of September there were not a lot of activity on their part as well - [2] ~30 commits (~23 that are marked `[backport]`) and even less [3] for narimiran)

[1] https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/8540#55418

[2] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/commits/devel?author=Araq

[3] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/commits/devel?author=narimir...

Right now, it seems like most of the work on the mainline seems to be done by community members.

there is one designer, but the same thing is true for Ruby, Python and many other programming languages

yeah, definitely not the only one pushing the design as well - dominick has had a pretty big impact I think right? He's at least helped me.