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
> 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).
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)
I admit, it’s a true work of love.
However, its bus factor is 1. I would love to see some effort to make sure it has a future beyond that.
Humans are volatile.
(What’s up with projects maintained by the late Jörg Schilling?)